


Refugee Road

by honeylocusttree



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Mental Illness, Warning: Disturbing imagery, dissociative disorder, mentally ill bruce banner, warning: depictions of death, warning: graphic depicitions of violence, warning:gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 23:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1204273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeylocusttree/pseuds/honeylocusttree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Please check all which apply:</p><p>☐ Bruce Banner is a soft-spoken, gentle man.<br/>☐ Bruce Banner is a monster.<br/>☐ Bruce Banner is a man with an untreated mental illness.<br/>☐ Bruce Banner doesn’t exist.<br/>☐ None of the above</p><p> </p><p>  <b>Warnings: Gore, graphic disturbing imagery, mental illness, discussions of death, discussions of mental illness</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Grotesquerie

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNINGS:** Gore, graphic disturbing imagery, mental illness, discussions of death, discussions of mental illness
> 
> Big thanks to my beta, [Claudiapriscus](http://archiveofourown.org/users/claudiapriscus/pseuds/claudiapriscus). Go read her work!
> 
>  
> 
> Incorporates Avengers movie canon, and some of my personal favorite comics canon. Doesn’t directly reference the Hulk movies. Brian Michael Bendis has said that canon should serve the story, and not the other way around. I’m taking that notion and running far and fast with it. The name Keraad is a bastardized form of Keraadistan, a made-up country from the Marvel universe. 
> 
> This fic is gen. 
> 
> See end of work for notes regarding quotations.

______________________

_Pero el dos no ha sido nunca un número_  
 _porque es una angustia y su sombra,_  
 _porque es la demostración del otro infinito que no es suyo_  
 _y es las murallas del muerto_  
 _y el castigo de la nueva resurrección sin finales._

  
_But two has never been a number,_  
 _It is anguish and its shadow_  
 _It is the demonstration of someone else’s infinity,_  
 _And the dead man’s walls._  
 _And the punishment of the new, unending resurrection._

  
______________________

**1: Grotesquerie**

He's dropped the milk, but he doesn’t remember where or when. At some point after he walked through the door it slipped out of his hand, hit the ground, and exploded. 

The sound of fluid dripping slowly onto the floor fills every corner of the room. Bruce counts two heartbeats between each drop. It’s not the milk though, or any other innocent liquid, that’s spattering so loudly onto the hard-packed dirt floor. It’s a thicker, heavier fluid with a distinctive and familiar odor. It’s thick red wetness, it’s fear, it’s pain. It’s blood. It’s _blood._ It’s a face contorted in agony, eyes rolling white, mouth slack, jaw agape.

It’s a woman’s body strung up four feet off the floor, her belly torn open, intestines spilling out, her arms spread wide and lashed to hooks hammered into the walls, gore dribbling from her corpse onto the floor. 

_The milk,_ a small voice in Bruce’s head whispers vaguely, but he can’t focus enough to really do anything about it. 

A cold white puddle creeps toward him across the floor. It’s going to mix with the other fluids. The dead woman’s…fluids. On the floor. The offal, and the blood. 

So much blood. 

He steps back, casts his eyes around the room. Objects flicker in and out of his field of vision. Everything’s strangely blurry and he starts to fumble for his glasses before he realizes that he’s wearing them. 

He lifts his eyes again to the blood-soaked horror in the middle of the room. A terrible god, suspended in torment. 

He doesn’t recognize her. She might be a local, but he’s never seen her before. Not at the market or along the dirt roads, not at the clinic, or in the fields, or hauling water from the well, or corralling a bunch of kids outside a house. 

It’s as if she never existed, before this moment. 

As if she’d been dragged here from somewhere else, as if she’s been strung up and gutted entirely for Bruce’s benefit. 

Does she—did she have a family? He wonders, and yanks his glasses off with something very like a gasp. Are there kids somewhere, waiting for her? What were her final thoughts? Did she feel anything but terror and pain? Did she lament the unfairness of it? 

Did she know that Bruce was to blame? 

He slides back further, closer to the still-open door. The milk is soaking into the dirt floor. Outside the air is humid and smells of cabbage and standing rice fields. He can hear, distantly, the cries of children, and of women at the market. Their voices carry on the breeze. 

The smell will carry on that same breeze. 

He has to leave. 

He bursts suddenly from his near inertia as if fired from a gun, scrambling to the cupboard in the corner, hopping ridiculously to avoid putting his feet in any wayward blood puddles. He throws open the splintered doors and hauls out everything inside, throwing it on the raised platform where he’s slept for the past five months. There’s very little there, but more than he can carry. He sorts through it ruthlessly, blunt fingers picking out the necessities and discarding everything else. 

He’s been doing this for years. He feels nothing as he casts aside photographs, artwork from children, trinkets and charms, and clothes too threadbare to be useful. A pair of broken headphones, a mug, three plastic bowls, cutlery, a few books. 

He empties out his duffel and repacks it with two shirts, a pair of sturdy pants. Water purification tablets. Random packets of salt and pepper. Emergency protein bars, expired now and hard as rocks, but still useful. Portable toothbrush, packets of tissues. He doesn’t even know where or when he acquired half these things. They seem to simply accrue to him, like dust around some gravity well. As if he’s got his own personal gravitational field. 

It’s just second nature now, he supposes, to always be prepared to flee. 

He straightens up, resettles his jacket, the one with all the pockets, his papers and various IDs. Slings the bag over his shoulder and goes to take a deep breath. Then doesn’t. 

The air is curdling. This entire time he’s been breathing in short, shallow gasps. He cuts his eyes one last time at the woman, and then plunges out the door into the street. 

There are no neighbors around, thank god. He hurries down the road, flanked on either side by muddy, post-harvest fields. A pall hangs in the air, visible water vapor over the rice fields, under an enormous, cloudless blue sky. 

It’s so hot. He can barely breathe, but it doesn’t matter. 

He cuts across the nearest dry field toward the horizon. No one sees him go, the American Doctor. No one will be there at the clinic tomorrow to help administer malaria drugs, or perform illegal surgery on children whose parents can’t afford the thirty mile trek to the city. He’s abandoning these people, as he’s abandoned so many people. 

He’s miles away before anybody goes looking for him. He never hears what they say about him after he’s gone. 

______________________

The call comes in the middle of the night, and Tony flails his way out of bed with a series of creative curses. Pepper mumbles and grunts and doesn’t sit up. Tony grabs for his nearest portable device and staggers out of the room, mostly to give her some peace and quiet. Which is why he winds up taking the first call he has from Bruce Banner in six months in his pristine master bathroom. 

“Ugh,” he grunts into the phone, scrubbing a hand through his hair and squinting in the glare. _“What?”_

There’s static on the line for a moment, a heartbeat’s length of times. He pulls the phone from his ear and glares at it, as much as possible with his eyes mostly shut. He can’t even see the damn display. Starbursts are erupting all over his field of vision. He’s just about to hang up when he hears, distantly, Banner’s voice. 

_“Tony?”_

It’s faint, very faint. As if it’s coming from the other end of a long tunnel. 

“Shit,” Tony offers intelligently, then remembers to bring the phone closer to his face. “What’s—Bruce it’s two—three in the damn a.m.!” 

There’s a long pause, long enough to make him think he hallucinated Bruce’s voice altogether. The static noise continues. Tony’s eyes narrow. 

“Bruce,” he says slowly, “What did you do?” 

_“I—uh, nothing,”_ the other man says hurriedly, _“It’s not—I don’t know. Something’s happened. Um. Something’s happening. But I don’t know…what. I need….”_

He trails off. Tony winces. This is not the voice of a man fully in control of a situation. 

“You need what? An airlift? A pair of pants? GPS track on your location? You still have the phone, I’m assuming you didn’t hulk out and lose everythi—”

_“Tony, no, stop, it’s not that.”_

“Then what?” 

_“Something—”_ And Tony can _hear_ Bruce performing some sort of tic or other, pinching his nose or messing with his buttons or his watch or his glasses or hair or something. Tony’s wondered more than once if the other man had all those weird little behaviors before he went on the run. 

Before he embarked on a career as a professional refugee. 

_“Something’s—I think something, someone, is chasing me.”_

Tony straightens his back. “Chasing you how? Helicopters and tanks?” 

_“I—no. Not like—no. There’ve been, uh. Incidents.”_

“Oh, that’s super-helpful. You can’t just—”

The bathroom door creaks open and Pepper peers around, eyebrows raised as far as possible as she squints in the light. Tony waves the universal sign of _I got this, go back to bed._

He turns toward the mirror as the door clicks shut again. 

“You can’t just call me at two—”

_“Three.”_

“Whatever! In the damn morning and—you’ve gotta give me something, buddy.” 

_“I got—listen, this is—Jesus, Tony,”_ a thin sigh winds through the connection between them. 

“Bruce.” He settles on the side of the sink. “Tell me. Something.” 

_“I don’t know…I was. I’d settled down. For a while. In a village. You uh, you won’t have heard of it. It didn’t really have a name.”_

Tony thins his lips but says nothing, just makes an encouraging noise. 

_“Something happened, uh, I’m not sure…when. Maybe a few days…? But. And I had to leave. But, Tony, it wasn’t anything I did.”_ His voice strains on those words. 

_“I don’t know if—I don’t know what I saw. What it meant. But I.”_ He stops. There’s a long silence. Static roars up between them, like the noise of the ocean. 

“Bruce!” Tony barks out. “Hey, you there?” 

But there’s nothing. 

For a long time, there’s nothing. 

______________________

Tony winds up in one of his lounge-slash-workspaces, manual and holographic displays scattered everywhere like stars in a particularly bizarre constellation, tracking and triangulating every scrap of information he can scrape up on a possible Banner-sighting. There’s not much to go on. 

For the first month after leaving the shores of the lower-forty-eight contiguous states, Bruce had kept in touch. If not directly, than at least by popping up occasionally in SHIELD inter-agency chatter by way of utilizing easily traceable hardware with embedded RFID tags near appropriate scanners, or by posting anonymous commentary to Stark-relevant publications, or solving whatever nuclear engineering-related puzzles Tony himself posted on various darknet forums. 

But in the last few months even those paltry leavings have dropped off precipitously. It was, Tony thinks, shortly before Bruce crossed into the tiny sovereignty of Keraad, a landlocked Southeast Asian nation whose populace largely makes its living through subsistence farming, and where technology hasn’t really kept up with the past, oh, thirty years of innovation that SI has largely spearheaded. 

Tony reflects on the difficulty of tracking someone through a landscape even Google doesn’t much consider worth spying on from space. He commandeers one of his own satellites and halfheartedly aims it at the tiny spot of green and brown. Sets up a few automatic tracking programs, and tasks JARVIS with sifting through local news reports for mentions of anything that could be even vaguely Bruce-related. 

The problem is that Tony doesn’t think Bruce is in Keraad anymore, or that he’s going to remain there much longer if he is. But there’s been ongoing social and/or political unrest in three of the four nations bordering Keraad for ten, six, and twelve years respectively, and he wonders suddenly if his erstwhile lab partner has gotten on the wrong side of some politico or, worse, some ruthless private American enterprise growing tea trees where they shouldn’t be. 

He works with what little he has, guesstimating possible locations and watching the results scroll across screens as JARVIS trawls newsfeeds in a dozen languages, while chewing on a piece of fruit leather. 

When the phone rings again, Tony nearly falls off his stool. The fruit leather goes flying. 

The sun’s just barely peeking over the horizon, and the sky is lightening to a lurid, Pepto-Bismol pink. 

He says as much to Bruce, who hesitates a beat on the other end. 

Finally he comes back with, _“Are you drunk?”_

“God, no!” Tony bites, exasperated, “I’m freaking out, you son of a bitch! Are you calling from some warlord’s dungeon or hiding out in tea tree groves, or what? What is _happening?”_

_“Uh, well, no to either of those? I just—the phone lost service, that’s all. I got out of range. I was on a ferry.”_

“And now you’re…?”

_“Not.”_

“Bruce,” Tony grits, “Are you even still in Southeast Asia?” 

_“I—well, yes. Southeast Asia’s pretty big, you know.”_

“And yet you’re the one who called me because _something is chasing you.”_

“Or someone.”

“Yes good, brilliant. Tell me where you are and then stay fucking there so I can send a jet to pick you up.” 

_“I don’t actually know where I am. I uh, I just got off the ferry…somewhere, I think it might be south of where I was. I, um, don’t really…speak the language?”_

“Then send me a photo! Send multiple photos! I’ll come and get you myself! You need to come in, right? That’s why you called me? You need to come in?” 

_“…I. Yes. I need to come in.”_

“Then send me. A photo. And stay the hell. Where you are.” 

_“I might not be able—I can’t guarantee. Anything. If they, if whoever they are, catch up to me…”_

Chrissakes. Hunted? Bruce is being hunted? Tony drags a hand down his face. He needs more coffee to deal with this. 

“I’m going to drink a quart of coffee, Bruce, and then I’m coming to get you. Capische? So _stay fucking put.”_

“I. I’ll try. But not if—”

“Do or do not, grasshopper,” Tony returns, and smiles grimly when photos start popping up on the displays nearest his position in the middle of the room. 

_“Mixing franchises,”_ Bruce returns, but his voice has gone distant, and Tony doesn’t think it’s just because of actual distance. His head whips toward the application displaying connection information, but just as his eyes find the feed, it terminates. 

The last photo that pops up shows nothing but a stretch of dirt road, and a pair of well-worn boots about Bruce’s size, covered in dust and blurry with motion. 

“Shit,” Tony mutters, “JARVIS, track those images _yesterday.”_

______________________

“…Tony,” Bruce says to the empty air, and then looks down at his hand where his fingers are curling slightly, as if grasping something that isn’t there. 

His other hand goes to the pockets of his vest, automatically, before he even realizes what it is he’s searching for. 

He’s surrounded by the sound of the ocean. He’s standing on a shore and the waves are gentle, and long grass blows in the salty breeze. He jolts and spins around, away from the water. Nearby an abandoned plaster hut squats beneath a line of palm trees. The windows are black and empty. 

A chill creeps along Bruce’s skin. He brings both hands to his chest and squeezes his left in his right. 

This is…wrong. 

This….

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how he got here. Wasn’t he just on the phone with Tony? But when was that? The light is wrong for the time of day. For the time of day he thought it was. 

Overhead the sky cants awkwardly. A sharp pain in his tailbone alerts him to the fact that he’s sat down suddenly and heavily in the sand. 

A gull cries, somewhere out over the water. 

He’s still wearing all his clothes. There’s no path of destruction. His muscles don’t hurt and he’s not tired or hungry. 

He _feels_ the Hulk inside him, the vague presence like a banked flame, the anger that burns but doesn’t really belong to him, but there’s no awareness there. For all intents and purposes, the Hulk is…asleep. 

His lips move. 

He doesn’t know where he is. 

Again. 

Eyes fixed on some distant point, vision vague and unfocussed, he again begins patting at his pockets for his phone. 

But it isn’t there. 

No. There’s nothing. 

Nothing. 

He draws a sharp breath and jerks his gaze down at his vest. Yanks open each pocket in turn. Finds loose change, tissues, handkerchief, ticket stubs, identification cards. A battery, a bit of string, a length of copper wire. He stands up and turns out his pants pockets. Cigarettes for barter, two pebbles, a pencil stub, an American nickel, six rubber bands. No phone. 

He lifts his eyes to the empty whitewashed shack. 

Not again. Not again. 

And this time they took his _phone._

Reflexively pulling the vest more tightly across his chest, he takes one leaden step, then another. Begins the long plod away from the beckoning waters of the ocean, the huge, all-forgiving sea, and moves toward the hollowed-out shell of someone else’s life waiting for him beneath the shadows of the trees. 

He only hopes that he’s wrong. That this time, things will be different. 

But when he finally arrives, and stands in the doorway, bracing his hands on either side of the plaster frame, he finds that he was not wrong. 

God, he wishes he’d been wrong. 

______________________

Thirty miles. Thirty goddamn miles south of his last known position. That’s where Tony finds him. 

He wouldn’t have found him at all without a healthy dose of dumb fucking luck, satellite feeds, and the mixed blessing that whatever it is that’s going on with Bruce, it’s clearly not operating in an organized, structured fashion. 

“You don’t call, you don’t write,” Tony mutters as he treks along the dirt lane, hat pulled low on his face and bag slung high over his shoulder. A handful of sparse trees nod their heads in the humid breeze. “Two weeks, you giant green asshole. I’m making you ride in the _cargo hold.”_

But when he sees the lonely figure standing on a clear-cut hill like an expatriate scarecrow, he swallows back whatever bile he’s been nursing. 

“You’ve lost weight,” is what he says by way of greeting, and isn’t at all delighted when Bruce yelps and spins violently around, eyes wide and glasses askew. 

Not at all. 

“I—what?” Bruce gasps. _“Tony?”_

“Oh, so you _do_ remember who I am,” he remarks blithely, slinging his pack onto the ground. “Because I’d been wondering.” 

“How did you even know where I—”

“Wonders of technology, okay? Well, that and the fact you seem to be travelling in circles for some damn reason, for the past two weeks since I last talked to you. Wanna let me in on what that’s all about?” 

“Uh.” 

“Fabulous. Mind if I take a load off? Thanks.” Tony plops down on the ground without further ado. Bruce stands over him, blinking owlishly. 

And God, he does look, well, _ill_ might be the best word for it. There’s no question that he’s lost weight, but he seems to have somewhat made up for it in added hair mass. His skin is greying and his eyes are more pink than anything else. His five o’clock-shadow is devolving into eight o’clock gloom. There’s a white accumulation at the corners of his mouth. 

“You look worse than I do,” Tony declares unceremoniously, “And I’ve been hiking up and down this armpit of a country for twelve-going-on-thirteen days. My _sunburn_ has sunburn.” 

“Sorry,” Bruce interjects faintly. 

“Do you _actually_ have dysentery? Or malaria? Can you even get that stuff? When’s the last time you ate? Here.” Tony lobs a pack of out-of-date shrimp crackers at the man’s head. “Ran out of protein bars a week ago,” he adds, though the attempted jab at the thoughtlessness of Bruce’s crisis and Tony’s extreme munificence in hunting his ass over half of Asia has no apparent effect. 

Bruce flinches to the side and the package bounces off his head and falls to lie sadly in the sparse grass at his feet. Tony sighs and reaches for it. 

“Can you sit down? Do your legs bend?” He wants to ask _Do you even know where you are?_ But thinks that’s maybe a question for another time. Instead he tugs at Bruce’s filthy slacks, until the man lowers himself down, with achingly slowness. 

A long silence stretches between them. Bruce stares blankly at the horizon. The wind carries the scent of standing water, and the cries of distant birds. 

“Tony, I—” Bruce starts, but Tony waves a hand. 

“It’s okay,” he says, tearing open the package and extracting a pink, fishy-smelling cracker. “Don’t worry about it.” 

Bruce exhales a breath. They sit in silence for a long time. 


	2. Tatterdemalion

**2: Tatterdemalion**

On the jet, Tony bullies Bruce out of his mud-and-possibly-blood-stained things and into clothes that have at least seen the inside of a washer in recent memory. The other man does his best to assist in the process, blinking owlishly from behind his glasses and fumbling awkwardly with his shirt buttons. Tony bats his hands away irritably and makes quick work of the ruined shirt and pants. He glances up only once, catching the blank non-expression on Bruce's face, before looking away again.

In any other situation, Bruce's behaviour would be at least a little hilarious. Right now it's just setting Tony's teeth on edge. 

“This is blood, isn't it?” Tony grumbles, shoving the stiff shirt and slacks into a bag and the bag into a wall compartment. He looks back at Bruce, who is staring vaguely at his hands where they rest in his lap. Tony resists the urge to growl. 

_“Bruce.”_

“What?” Bruce actually starts, and his hands twitch in his lap. Tony grimaces. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, during which Bruce carries on his scarily accurate impression of a man who’s been clobbered in the head with a chair one too many times a tad bit too effectively for Tony’s comfort. 

Finally he snorts and turns away. 

“You need a shave,” Tony says, “And a shower. Both of which are happening when we get back stateside.” 

Which, following the plane ride, the other plane ride, and the long schlep in the back of a very nice car that Tony rents under an assumed name because if Bruce is being hunted, there’s no reason to leave any more breadcrumbs than absolutely necessary, does eventually happen. 

Keyword here being _eventually._

They hit one of Tony’s smaller houses, a cottage upstate, and Tony basically hauls Bruce out of the car, trying not to wince at either the smell of unwashed scientist, or the fact that he can feel the man’s _ribs_ underneath the shirt Tony’d forced him into. 

“When’s the last time you _ate,_ anyway?” Tony mumbles, and Bruce stops trying to help leverage himself out of the car for a moment and mumbles something like _ung._

“Good, very helpful contribution, wonderful. Thank you.” 

Tony knows himself pretty well, and knows that he’s not cut out to be a caretaker for _anything_ soft and squishy and human, so he thinks it’s pretty fortunate that Bruce is the sort of person who balks at having anyone look after him. Or maybe it’s just the result of years of being conditioned to expect little to no help. Regardless of the cause, he awkwardly but politely tells Tony that no, he can manage to bathe, and shave, himself just fine, thank you, and Tony retreats with some relief. 

He goes to stand on the back patio, taking in the magnificent view of the drop-off and the tree-lined valley below, and far away the blue shadows of mountains. He inhales the fresh air deeply. He’s trying not to dwell too hard on thousand-yard stares and blood-encrusted trousers. 

Instead he calls Pepper. 

______________________

There’s music being piped in from somewhere, and Bruce can’t bring to bear the physical control it would take to figure out where it’s coming from, much less how to stop it. 

He’s been sitting on the floor for the past twenty minutes, legs splayed awkwardly in front of him, waiting for his motor control to come mostly back online. The air is full of steam and smells of cleanliness, to a degree that he genuinely hasn’t experienced in years—his short stint aboard the Helicarrier notwithstanding. The luxury on display in just this bathroom is a little appalling. His mind wanders to calculations of the amount of energy being expended just to power this room, then remembers that these days the name Stark is synonymous with clean energy. So maybe it doesn’t matter. 

The times they are a-changin’, etcetera. 

Nevertheless, his shower of the past five months or so had been a hose on a stick behind his shack, and his toilet essentially a hole in the ground. The porcelain and chrome fixtures currently hemming him in on every side are, frankly, a little intimidating. He’s in no hurry to move from his current position propped up by the door. 

He figures Tony’s around somewhere, though. If he waits too long, the other man might turn up and then the whole thing would be even more awkward than it already is. 

With a groan Bruce drags himself upright and staggers toward the bathtub, shedding clothes as he goes. Sinking into the hot water is a blessing, though it’s rendered immediately filthy as he does so. 

It’s been a long time since Bruce has been clean. 

Maybe too long. 

______________________

“I don’t know, Pep, whatever…events he experienced that chased him halfway across the continent, I’m not getting any hits with any of my searches—even the satellites. No records of destruction, nothing weird even on a small scale…of course it’s possible there could have been things hidden by other ongoing events in the region, but it’s pretty obvious that there hasn’t been anything Hulk-related in months, and nothing in that hemisphere for years. So I don’t know.” 

_“But you are planning on getting to the bottom of it,”_ she says, and she’s not asking a question. 

“I’m gonna do my damndest,” he tells her. 

_“Good. I’ll expect regular reports.”_ And here she smiles, that gentle, genuine smile she reserves for him. 

He loves her. So much more than he would ever have believed himself capable of. 

“Well, _something_ spooked him, anyway. And he looks like warmed over garbage. I’m not feeling too peachy terrific either, to be honest, but at least I can string a coherent sentence together. He’s in bad shape.” 

_“Well then he’s lucky to have you looking out for him. I’ll let you know if I dig up anything on my end.”_

After they wind through another fifteen minutes of chatter, mostly so he can soak up the sound of Pepper’s voice and bask in her presence in his life, he disconnects with only minimal regret. Immediately the air feels about five degrees cooler. 

“Brr,” Tony says, and goes back indoors. 

He wanders down the hall that leads to the bathroom he’d deposited Bruce in. He’s not generally the sort to listen at keyholes, but pausing outside the door he hears nothing much from within aside from the very faint strains of some classical strings. Pepper would have known the name of the composer and the title of the piece, and probably the identities of the performers into the bargain. But Pepper isn’t here. 

“Hey, Bruce? Buddy? You decent in there?” Tony pushes through the door without waiting for a response, and isn’t overwhelmingly shocked when he finds the man conked out in the bathtub, head lolling onto the porcelain lip, mouth slack. One arm hangs out of the tub, fingers trailing the floor. Dirty water has pooled at the tips of his fingers, dark against the clean white floor tiles. 

It looks not unlike blood. 

“Hey, Bruce,” Tony blurts, sudden and loud. He winces at the noise but the other man doesn’t stir. 

“Wake up, before you drown in there, come on.” Tony pads across the damp floor. “Shut off that damn music, will you?” he adds distractedly, and the sprightly violins cease immediately. The following silence is a little creepy. 

“Bruce, get up, come on.” And here he reaches out, jabs the other man in the shoulder with two fingers. 

Bruce’s eyes fly open and he rears up, surging out of the water and stumbling back a step in the tub. His eyes lock on Tony’s face and they’re huge and terrified and there’s no recognition in them at all. 

“What—” he babbles, “Who—?” His face twitches and his mouth works and there’s such naked confusion in his entire body that Tony finds himself smiling as reassuringly as he can manage, hands held up in placation. 

He feels like a marionette, he feels ridiculous. 

“It’s okay,” he tries. 

Bruce stares at him, chest rising and falling, ribs achingly visible over the hollow of his belly. The hair on his body is speckled and grey; his skin is the color of wet dough. 

Tony says, “Bruce.” 

And that seems to do it. Bruce heaves another breath and flails out an arm, slaps a splay-fingered hand on the wall and croaks, “Tony?” 

Tony shrugs. Grabs a towel and chucks it across the room, where of course Bruce fails to catch it. He shrugs and strolls out of the room. Gives the man some privacy. 

“Get cleaned up and come out here,” he throws over his shoulder as he passes through the door. “I should see if there’s any food around the place at all.” 

He shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn’t say, _That was pretty fucked up,_ but he thinks it really, really hard. 

______________________

_In the darkness a monster sleeps. Huge, misshapen. Beloved of none. Abandoned and hated._

_Skin stretch across bone, hollow like a drum._

_Lit from within by noxious fire._

_Burning poison._

_Radiance._

______________________

Bruce pulls the soft jacket around himself and is annoyed that it fits very well. Somehow he thought it would be too small, or cut specifically to suit Tony’s frame, but it seems to be a friendly sort of jacket, eager to please. He finger-combs his damp hair away from his face and scratches at his jaw. 

He’s hairier than he remembers being the last time he looked in a mirror. He’s not sure when he most recently shaved. Doesn’t remember where he lost his bag, or his all-purpose knife. Doesn’t remember _when_ he lost them. 

He only knows that they’re gone. 

It’s hard to imagine that his as-yet unidentified tormentors have somehow done away with them, for some obscure purpose. People, he assumes, who would slaughter and eviscerate half-a-dozen anonymous women and men for no other reason than to hound Bruce across half a continent don’t seem like the types to steal away his smallest personal belongings, though he supposes ascribing motivation with the minimal knowledge he has of them is a hopeless endeavor. But he can’t quite bring himself to imagine some shadowy figure taking a break from kidnapping and murder to hide his pocket knife, so he’s just going to have to accept the fact that he managed to lose the thing somewhere. 

_…in an alley reeking of urine and hot garbage four blocks from the American embassy…_

He shoves his hands in the pockets of the pants Tony has lent him and goes in search of the other man. The house, which he supposes Tony would call a _cottage,_ because he is a man with no sense of proportion, seems to spread out forever in every direction, an endless series of halls and vast, sprawling rooms. He’s starting to feel the onset of a mild case of agoraphobia by the time he runs the other man down, puttering around a kitchen roughly five times the size of Bruce’s last dwelling place. 

“Well this is, uh…quaint,” he offers, when Tony notices him. The other man sparkles, which ought to be impossible when nothing about his face or posture changes in any perceptible way. 

“Remind me to give you the tour later,” he says, in that machine-gun cadence of his. Bruce shrugs and sort of slouches into the room, squinting a little in the wash of sunlight slanting through the trees outside. 

“Where are we?” he asks. 

“Upstate New York. It’s late summer, you know, in case you hadn’t noticed.” 

“I, uh…okay.” 

“Come get food. I’m not bringing it over there.” 

So they eat. Bruce stoically ignores the fact that Tony is stoically ignoring the reason for Bruce’s presence. It’s bound to come up eventually, after all. So for the moment he focuses laserlike attention on defrosted bread, lunch meat, and cheddar cheese. 

It’s been months since he’s had cheddar cheese. Maybe years. 

He thinks maybe they’ll be discussing his…situation after he’s managed to scarf down two-point-five sandwiches and guzzles something like an entire pot of coffee, but that proves not to be the case. Instead he finds himself trailing after Tony through the highways and byways of his so-called “cottage,” taking in the sights and visiting such roadside attractions as the Jacuzzi Room, the Other Master Bathroom, and the Room with the Velvet Walls. 

“…Why?” Bruce has to ask on the last one, and Tony can only offer a shrug in return. 

There’s a weird shrine to Popular Mechanics in one wing of the sprawling estate of a cottage, which Tony informs him is actually the room where he supposedly sleeps, “You know, if I ever spent any time up here,” being the explanation Bruce is apparently required to accept on the subject. 

“The staff only visits about once a month, to keep it from collapsing under a pile of expired squirrels or something.” 

“Good grief,” is all Bruce can really contribute to that. 

“Well, I say staff, really it’s just a couple of techs. Keep the parts greased, ‘bots up and cleaning, that sort of thing.” 

“Oh.” More seems to be required of him than that and he adds, “Okay.” 

Tony rolls his eyes dramatically. 

“We could’ve gone back to New York. The Tower’s almost finished, y’know.” 

“Ah,” Bruce says drily. “Right. The Tower. The one I put a hole in the floor of with the body of a near-immortal superbeing from outer space.” 

“That’s the one!” Tony grins, or at least, he bares all his teeth. Bruce stares at him for a moment before shifting his gaze elsewhere. 

“No, this is probably the better option. Listen, Tony,” he takes a breath and rubs one eye with the heel of his hand, “About all of this—”

“It’s okay,” Tony interrupts, voice oddly hoarse, and Bruce looks at him. “There’s time, okay? We can just…take a second. It doesn’t have to be life-threatening drama at every turn, we can just be people here for another minute or two.” 

An involuntary laugh blurts out of Bruce’s mouth before he can stop it. He lifts a hand toward his mouth but can’t drag back the words that come falling out. 

“That’s a terrible idea, we don’t get to be _people.”_

Tony’s eyes widen. For a moment, something flashes across his face that is fragile and rare. An ugly sort of hurt. Bruce winces. Sometimes he forgets that other people aren’t used to thinking of themselves as monsters. 

He should open his mouth; he should apologize. 

Instead he says, “If someone’s hunting me, I mean if that’s what this is, then we should be prepared to deal. If they show up here.” 

“I’m not afraid of—whoever. _Whatever,”_ Tony bites out viciously. Bruce rocks back a step, startled. 

“This is,” he licks his lips. “This is okay, right?” 

Tony says, “I wouldn’t have spent two weeks looking for you if it was a problem.” His voice is flat. 

“Look, I just meant…” he pauses, worries at the knuckles of his left hand, the dry skin there, “I didn’t mean. What I said. I just thought we shouldn’t relax. That’s all.” 

“I got what you meant.” 

“I didn’t…I’m sorry.” 

“It’s okay.” 

Bruce looks down at the floor. It’s polished and shiny, and as if it’s never been touched by a speck of dirt. 

“Aright then,” he says. 

______________________

Later that evening Bruce stands beside a window in the room Tony had assigned him during their tour. He stares at the distant mountains and tries to guess what the other man must experience, when he surveys the vista. A sense of proprietorship, maybe. Or maybe he doesn’t really see the mountains at all. Maybe to Tony Stark, the rest of the world is just a two-dimensional backdrop to the reality that is his own existence. 

Bruce watches the light fade from the distant peaks. Somewhere, he knows, a woman is carrying firewood on her back up the slope of another mountain. Somewhere a man stands on an assembly line for thirteen hours, soldering tiny parts into electronics that will feed the insatiable Western appetite for the newest, sleekest telecommunication gadget. Somewhere a child cuts cloth on a factory floor to be made into dress shirts, and every cent she earns goes to help her family stay alive. 

Somewhere the world is terrible. 

Somewhere ordinary people are being crushed out of their lives. 

Somewhere the shack Bruce lived in his been burned to the ground, and the ground turned under. Somewhere the blood of an ordinary woman has been mixed into the soil. 

Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere. 

He lifts his hands, slowly unfolds his fingers, and places them gently on the glass door. Its temperature matches the ambient temperature of the room. It’s as thin and fragile as the bones of a bird. If he closed his hands he could crush the whole world. 

Billions of tiny flames, struggling in a darkness that will ultimately consume them. The woman, the man, the child. 

Bruce exhales, and draws his hands away. Flicks his eyes around, and then down. He’s lost his shoes somewhere. His toes curl against the gleaming hardwood floor. 

There are books in a shelf against the wall. They have the appearance of having been well-loved, once, though he doesn’t know by whom. 

He was never a man for literature, before. 

He pulls one unremarkable volume from the shelf. Plucks it from the multitudes. Opens it at random and looks at the page. 

Closes it again almost immediately. But it’s too late. He’s seen. 

He goes and sits on the end of the bed and watches the sun approach the mountains, deepening and darkening, until the light cuts straight through and shines over his fingers where they grip the edge of the mattress. 

He comes back to himself with his eyes still open, and the sun has vanished. The sky is immense and black. He hasn’t moved, and his body is locked rigidly in place. 

Under his skin, a monster moves, like a tiger through the undergrowth. 

“Hush,” Bruce murmurs. _“No solloces. Silencio. Que no nos sientan._

_“Espera.”_

After that, the monster is silent. 

Bruce sleeps sitting up that night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _No solloces. Silencio. Que no nos sientan.  
>  Espera. _
> 
>  
> 
> No sobbing. Silence. They must not hear us.  
> Wait.
> 
>  
> 
> —Federico Garcia Lorca, _Omega (Poem for the Dead)_


	3. Gibbeting

****

**3: Gibbeting**

Tony knows something’s gone weird when he wanders into the kitchen and finds Bruce standing by the open patio door. The fridge door is wide, the kitchen lights are off, and Bruce is staring into the middle distance. 

“Mornin’, Ralph,” Tony tries, eyes flickering over the floor. There are bits of grass and leaves strewn around the gleaming tile. He comes around the kitchen island and isn’t surprised to see Bruce’s bare toes, caked in mud and vegetal debris. 

“You can’t be serious,” he mutters, and then, “Hey! Are you with me?” 

“I heard a noise,” Bruce mutters, clearly not even close to firing on all cylinders, “I went to look, but I couldn’t find…anything.” 

“And when was this?” Tony grouses. He thinks he should be steering Bruce away from the door, but frankly he’s not sure if he should even touch him. Is it like waking a sleepwalker? And isn’t that a myth anyway? How did he wind up in this position? He’s so terrible at this. 

Bruce does turn, now, eyes flickering around the room before finding Tony’s face, then sliding away again. 

He says, “…Tony?” and starts oddly patting at his shirt, like a smoker feeling for a lighter. Or a man looking for a phone. 

“It’s me,” Tony says, and this time he does reach out, abortively, before circumnavigating the man entirely and going to shut the patio door. “And you’re letting in bugs. What were you, raised in a barn? Etcetera etcetera.” 

“I lost my phone.” 

“No shit, Bruce,” and he peers at the other man, trying to ascertain if he’s actually asleep. “That was two weeks ago.” 

Bruce inhales through his nose, then lifts his eyes to something over Tony’s head. 

Okay, this has officially gotten _really weird._ Bad weird. _Pepper, help,_ weird. 

“I can smell the blood from here,” Bruce says, and all the hair on the back of Tony’s neck stands up. 

“Come away from the door,” Tony says faintly, though he doesn’t know why. Just for something to say, probably. 

“Why do people always have to _die?”_ Bruce’s voice is plaintive. 

Instead of answering, Tony stalks across the room and manually slaps the lights on. In the flood of sudden radiance Bruce cries out and covers his eyes with a hand, hunching over and lifting the other as if in self-defense. 

Outside a flock of birds explodes from the trees with a noise like thunder. Tony stares at Bruce in silence, watches the man unfold, and, blinking, come back to himself. 

It’s awful. 

“Mornin’, Ralph,” Tony offers (again) after an entire agonizing minute of silence has passed. 

Bruce blinks rapidly a few more times. Offers a wan smile that almost perfectly hides his confusion. 

Almost. 

“Uh,” he says. 

“It’s ‘Sam.’ ‘Mornin’ Sam,’ ‘Mornin’ Ralph.’ Like that.” 

“I believe you.” Bruce rubs at his mouth and looks away, eyes flickering around the room briefly before coming back to rest in Tony’s general vicinity. “I believe you. Um. Why is there grass all over the floor?” _“What’s happening?”_ He doesn’t say, but Tony hears it anyway. 

“Well, I think that one’s on you,” Tony says. “You should probably go wash your feet.” And he knows he’s being a bad friend, that he should try to really get to the bottom of what the _hell_ is going on with Bruce, _now,_ or maybe like _yesterday,_ but there’s a very good reason Tony Stark went into engineering and robotics and not human psychology. 

Aptitude. 

Bruce is rubbing his face and yawning, skirting the island and heading for the doorway. He absently shuts the fridge door as he passes.

“What time is it?” he mumbles as he goes. Tony steps out of the way. 

“About nine,” Tony answers. 

Bruce comes to a halt on the other side of the doorway, in the dark lounge beyond. He lifts his head and looks directly at Tony. 

Tony clears his throat, awkwardly. “We’ll figure out what’s happening,” he says. “Whatever it is. Just, go get cleaned up. And we’ll talk about it.” 

“We should, yeah.” Bruce nods vaguely. “We should talk.” 

Tony watches him shuffle off in the direction of his room, trailing mud and grass the entire way. Only when the other man has gone does he head for the patio door, fishing his phone out of his pocket as he goes. 

______________________

Bruce doesn’t remember falling asleep, and he certainly doesn’t remember waking up. 

There’d just been a terrible light and a pain in his face, and then he was standing in the cottage’s kitchen, nearly blind. 

He runs the water in the shower and shut his eyes. Hums along with the low rumble of the monster in his head. Everything’s so vague and fuzzy. But he knows he’s going to need to reconfigure his hypothesis to account for this new data. 

These past few weeks, he’s lost time. More than once. He’s assumed it was the result of some weird, ongoing assault, something concomitant with the dead bodies he’d invariably discover whenever he came to rest for a few moments in any lonely place. It made sense, if he didn’t think about it too much—he could imagine that he was being targeted, as he’d been targeted for most of his life, by forces he couldn’t fight. Now that a direct attack was out of the question, surely it would be simplest for some assailant to play psychological games with him. Butchering people and stealing time from him was as good a way as any to drive him from port to port, unable to find a moment’s rest, until he finally collapsed from exhaustion. 

Steam fills the bathroom and he swipes a hand across the mirror, leaving trails of dirt where silver once gleamed. 

Now that he comes to think about it, nothing about that story makes a whole lot of sense. 

He’s been having blackouts for years, of course. But he’d always been able to account for his whereabouts afterward. All he had to do was follow the trail of destruction. 

He supposes that’s what he’ll have to do this time as well. 

As he strips off his clothes and steps under the searing hot water, Bruce hopes desperately that he’ll find nothing at the end of the trail. 

This time he would like very, very much to be wrong. 

______________________

“Holy _shit,_ Pepper,” Tony hisses into the phone, “I am _not_ equipped to deal with this.” 

_“Why are you whispering?”_

“Uh, well, mostly to _keep from screaming.”_

_“Okay. Okay. Calm down. Tell me what happened.”_

So he does, in fits and starts, finishing with, “—and I’m really starting to think this—this situation, whatever it is, calls for expertise that I, y’know, _don’t have._ Never had.” 

Pepper is silent for a while. Finally she gives a light cough. 

_“Well I think you’re right.”_

“Right, okay then, I should—”

“But,” she carries on, right over him, as if he hadn’t spoken at all, _“You were the one he trusted. You’re the one he called, after all.”_

“I know. I know. I get it, human responsibility and whatever, oh my god. But I don’t think we should stay, uh, _here.”_

_“At the cottage?”_

He’s silent for a while. Watches some random birds flop around the deck. He has no idea what kinds of birds they are. Little brown fluff things. 

Finally, “I brought him here for protection. But…”

_“But you’re not sure what’s happening is an external threat after all?”_

He’s so out of his depth. “I don’t know. I…really pretty much hope it is. If it’s not I,” he rubs at his eyes, “If it’s not. I don’t know.” 

_“That says a lot about our lives, doesn’t it?”_

“Eh, probably not all that much. God. Okay.” He flaps a hand at a little brown ball that’s hopped too close. It leaps into the air and takes off. A marvel of natural engineering. Sinews and skin and feathers over tiny, hollow bones. 

Remarkable. 

“Okay. I’m going back in.” 

_“Good luck then. I’ll pray for you.”_

“Don’t—don’t do that,” he says, and with nothing more intimate as a sign-off, he cuts the call. She’ll understand. 

He hopes she will, anyway. 

Yeah, she probably will. 

______________________

“Tell me about Keraad,” Tony says from the doorway. The lounge is still dark, and full of shadows. 

Bruce looks up from his bowl of Lucky Charms, mid-chew. He swallows. 

“What do you want to know?” 

“Anything. Everything. Day in the life of professional refugee Banner, Robert Bruce, esq.” 

In spite of himself, Bruce snorts a laugh. 

_Is everything a joke to you?_ He hears vaguely, an echo of a voice from a time that now seems very far away. 

_Funny things are._

He stirs his cereal and considers how best to answer the question. When he opens his mouth, though, what comes out is, “Why weren’t you afraid of me?” 

Tony perches on the arm of an overstuffed chair and snorts. “Have you _seen_ you?” 

“That’s not an answer.” 

“Only one you’re gonna get.” 

“ _No,_ y—” Bruce shakes his head. “You don’t know what kind of person I am. And you didn’t then, either.” 

“I told you, I read all about your _accident.”_ He says it the same way, with a faint edge of derision. For whom, or what, Bruce can’t guess. 

“But that’s not all you read, is it?” 

Tony puts his head on one side. Says nothing. 

“I know SHIELD has a profile on me. Maybe more than one. Should I think you didn’t sneak a peek at it, at some point?” 

Tony’s sighs exasperatedly. “Hey, if you’re searching for someone to be a collaborator in indulging your little self-flagellation kink, keep lookin’, pal. It’s not gonna be me.” 

“Hah.” Bruce fishes a brightly-colored wheat-and-wheat-byproducts pebble from his greying milk. “You’re the guru of self-acceptance, aren’t you? And I’m your benighted student…” He slurps from the end of his spoon and when Tony doesn’t say anything he goes on, “Last few months I’ve typically eaten rice, most meals. Some vegetables when they’re available. Lots of rice. Poverty isn’t a noble undertaking. Being hungry, or cold doesn’t lend a person value or worth…but at least it’s _human.”_

He looks up. Tony’s got his arms folded across his chest, and he’s staring resolutely at the wall. Bruce feels a little twinge of shame. 

“Look, Keraad was just a place to be. It could probably have been anywhere, as long as it was possible to get across the border. And the border there is fairly porous. You must know about the unrest nearby. In this case I just needed to bribe the right people. I wasn’t on a humanitarian mission. I wasn’t even really running. It was just…easier to fall back on what I knew.” 

Tony looks at him this time. It’s strange, for a man believed by so many for so long to have no human feeling at all, how open his face is sometimes. How obvious his emotions. 

“You know this is what I do,” Bruce says. 

“Well it shouldn’t be.” The fierceness of his anger is almost startling. 

Bruce sets aside his bowl on the coffee table with a click. He smoothes the skin down on the back of his left hand with the thumb of his right. He’s still dehydrated; the skin doesn’t have its usual elasticity. 

“It’s been easier…since. Since everything that happened, in New York. In some ways, anyway. I thought about what you said, even though I didn’t want to. And…you weren’t wrong about, um, _accepting._ Him. The uh. The Hulk.” He pauses. “I hear…him…more, now. There’s less pressure, he’s closer to the surface and there’s less…pain. But.” 

Tony gets up, says, “I’m opening a window.” 

“ _But_ things like this don’t just go away. A monster who knows he’s a monster can’t just…stop being one. And no amount of acceptance is going to change that.” 

“Oh for _God’s sake,”_ Tony flings the curtains wide and spins back around, lit suddenly from behind by terrible radiance. “You’re not a monster!” 

Bruce holds up a hand in front of his eyes. The light streams through his open fingers. 

“Yes,” he says simply, squinting into the glare, “I am.” 

“Bruce—”

“People _die_ when I’m around.” 

Tony snarls, “And sometimes they _don’t.”_

“No, that’s not what I—something happened, in Keraad, something—it wasn’t anything I did. But it still happened because of me.” 

And into Tony’s silence, Bruce tells him. About his shack, about the woman, about the blood—he even tells him about the milk. And he tells him about crossing the farms, about hitching a ride, about walking all night and all day. About the stars overhead, about the mountains in the distance. 

As he talks, his skin occasionally ripples with goosebumps. He tells about the others, the bodies in strange places, following wherever he ran. Corpses strung up in shacks, staked out on the earth, eyes wide and shocked, bodies violated and open to the elements. Tony’s eyes grow more shadowed as he speaks, and his lips draw thinner and thinner. He steps closer to Bruce, but in doing so manages, somehow, to seem farther away. 

“And I had blackouts,” Bruce finishes, “More than once. That’s what happened to the phone. I was talking to you, and then all of a sudden I was…somewhere else. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know how long it took me to get there. But I lost time.” 

“And you didn’t hulk out?” 

Bruce shakes his head. “And that’s the thing. I thought I was being hunted…maybe somehow someone had found a way to affect my mind directly. Up until now I was sure, so sure. And if someone could directly affect my mind like that, think how much damage they could do to…whoever they wanted. But. Tony. I’ve been thinking a bit more about this.” He takes a breath, tries to lift his eyes, but finds that he can’t. Falls to picking at the nails of one hand, working away at tiny, invisible specks of dirt. 

“What happens if you embrace the monster? If you welcome it inside…what if it never leaves?” 

______________________

_The light fills cracks, with the fury of conflagration. Boils into the desolate places, the starveling lonely hollows where nothing goes. The forsaken heart, the loveless places, are filled to the brim with fire._

_With burning._

_Nothingness is given flesh. Form is pasted over emptiness, and filled to bursting with the fires of eternity._

_Hate._

_Rage._

_Bone and skin, muscle and blood, fire and light, death made flesh._

_Burning, all-devouring, stronger than pain. Stronger than the monsters on the outside._

_Stronger than the_ true _monster, the only monster that ever mattered._

 _So strong that the memories can’t hurt._

_Here they would be safe. Here they would be protected. Here the memories belong, awash in a light so bright, so terrible, so vivid_

_…that they cannot be seen._

______________________

“My whole point was that you’re one of the good guys,” Tony says, as they crashed through underbrush and generally make enough noise that every living thing has fled from their passage. “You’ve always been one of the good guys.” 

Bruce shoves aside a branch and curls his lip. “How can you possibly say something that naïve?” 

“It’s not—you saved the world!” 

“That was _one time._ And it doesn’t make up for… _anything.”_

Tony spits, “If we can’t believe in redemption, then what the hell are we even—” but breaks off. 

Bruce smiles a grim little smile to himself. 

They’re following the path laid during his strange little walkabout that morning. It doesn’t have the familiar characteristics of a Hulk-made path, which means that they couldn’t, for example, drive an entire theoretical military convoy through the devastation. Mostly there are just some footprints sunk into the mud, some trampled long grasses, and some broken sticks and twigs. 

“Does any of this, uh, feel familiar?” 

Bruce wishes he could say it does. But he shakes his head. 

“Nope.” 

“Great.” 

They emerge into a small meadow. Bruce squints and adjusts his glasses minutely before picking up the trail again. 

“You never answered my question.” 

“What question?” 

“About why you weren’t afraid. Of me. Even a little.” 

Tony grins when he answers. Of course Bruce can’t see him, but he can hear it. 

“What, did it bother you, maybe? It did, didn’t it? Little lack of respect there, hm?” 

“I don’t—” Bruce stops short and turns, irritated. “ _No,_ it was just—but _why?”_

“I keep telling you—”

“But what was the mental process?” he sets off again, trusting Tony to follow. “You thought, ‘Hey, here’s a guy who can level city blocks with his bare hands, I should cozy up to him?” 

There’s a long silence at that. Bruce watches a startled rabbit hurtle away into the underbrush. 

They’re reached the far treeline before Tony answers. When he does his voice is dry, scratchy. 

“I’ve killed more people than you, Bruce,” he says. 

Bruce stops then, for just a moment. His foot hovers over dark loam. 

He presses on. 

The trees whisper in an August breeze as Tony continues, “If things were different…if I had less money, maybe…if the world made a different kind of sense, then. Um.” He pauses, then adds, “In some places I’m still considered a war criminal.” 

“So?” Bruce shrugs. 

“So really _you’re_ the one who should be scared of _me.”_

Way off in the distance some bird chooses that moment to start shouting about its territory and suitability as a mate. Bruce screws up his face as his mind turns over the sudden variables presented by Tony’s bizarre supposition. 

“Wait,” he says, _“…What?”_

“You know this one, right?” Tony pushes up closer until they’re nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, shoving branches out of his way. “In a fight between Superman and Batman, who would win? I mean, _really?”_

“Well, everybody knows that—hold on,” Bruce breaks off, “Am I _Superman_ in this scenario?” 

“Well, unless you wanted to be Catwoman.” 

Bruce coughed, cut his eyes to the forest floor. “Always kind of preferred Lois, actually.” 

“Well I guess I didn’t really see that one com—urk!” He breaks off when Bruce’s hand smacks out and slaps against his chest. Bruce would apologize but he’s suddenly too distracted to care much about Tony Stark’s relative level of comfort. 

Bruce inhales the air and wishes he hadn’t. He slaps a hand over his nose and mouth. 

“Shit,” he mutters, _“Shit.”_

He so wanted to be wrong. 

Beside him, Tony’s eyes fly around the area, darting over trees and vines and bushes. 

“What?” He demands, shifting his weight around, _“What?”_

“You don’t _smell_ that?” Bruce asks incredulously. It’s _everywhere._ It chokes the air. 

“Smell _what?_ Bird shit? Bruce, what the _hell?”_

He rips his glasses off his face. He doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t want to _know._ Beside him, Tony sways back a step. 

_He’s dropped the milk somewhere._

“…Tony?” he hears his own voice, coming from a great distance. 

“I think we should go back,” he hears, and a hand snatches at the material of his shirt, just at the shoulder. “Something’s wrong.” 

“No,” he says, and gently pushes away the hand. He hears the sound of a heavy body crashing into the undergrowth, but it’s somewhere else. 

He drops his glasses. 

He starts to run. 

______________________

“No,” Tony mutters, scrambling to his feet and struggling to draw breath, “Dammit, _no.”_

He sprints after the other man. There should be no possible way that he can’t catch him. He’s making too damn much noise, for one thing. But it’s like chasing a phantom. He catches flashes of brown, edges of white. Ripples of something else. Something harder to see, in this shadowy green place. 

When Bruce pushed him away, it had _hurt._ He’s wheezing, struggling with every breath. And Bruce is far away, and getting farther with every step. 

When Tony stops to draw breath, leaning against a tree, he hears a sound like splintering bone, and a deep, agonized groaning. 

“Oh,” he says, and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “Dammit, Bruce.” 

He pushes away from the tree, and dashes toward the noise. Through the trees he sees terrible shadows. An arm, a hand, an eye that burns sick and bright….

Branches crash to the forest floor. The groaning turns into a howl, and then a scream. An enormous fist flattens a tree and it crashes toward Tony. He curses and flings himself on the ground, covering his head with both arms. 

The noise goes on for a while. 

And then, without warning, it stops. 

It all just…stops. 

Slowly, Tony lifts his head. There’s no sound at all, not even birds, and it’s eerie as hell. He sits up carefully, achingly slowly. 

“Bruce?” he calls, and again, “Hey, Bruce!” 

But there’s no answer. 

Later, he goes back to the house alone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Gibbeting** refers to the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of executed criminals were hung on public display to deter other existing or potential criminals. (Wikipedia)


	4. Renunciate

**4: Renunciate**

Tony listens to the distant roaring, echoing from the mountains. 

It’s been days. He’s seen no sign of either the Hulk or Bruce. But he hears the noises, at night. Something huge snuffling around the borders of the house. Walking slow. Dangerously soft. 

He’s given up all pretense of respecting privacy and pulled every scrap of data on Bruce he’s ever been able to dig up. _Everything._ He called Pepper after his return to the cottage and genuinely didn’t know what to tell her, but somehow she understood anyway. 

_“I’ll come up,”_ she’d said, _“Right now. I can be there in a few hours.”_

And God, he wanted her here. To have her support, her advice and help and simple presence, close to hand. And wanting that, even for a moment…he was ashamed of himself. His readiness to risk her life, still, after everything, simply to assuage his own distress—he couldn’t allow himself that luxury of selfishness. He just…couldn’t.

“Maybe just wait a few days. I don’t know….” he took a breath, said harshly, “I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.” 

_“Well…”_ she hesitated, _“Just—be careful, Tony.”_

“Always am,” he grinned. Pepper rolled her eyes, but at least let that one slide. 

After, he went back to his files. 

In the forest, the monster screams. 

______________________

He plays the last few moments in the woods over and over in his mind. Picks through every detail for some trigger that could have set Bruce off. Some sight, some smell. Something Tony said, or did. But all he remembers is the look on Bruce’s face when he froze, in that sudden singular instant, when he smacked a hand into Tony’s chest, when his eyes fixed on some distant point. When he became suddenly ensnared by some aspect of their environment that Tony could neither see nor hear. 

He remembers, _“I can smell the blood from here.”_

He wanders the house. He goes and paces the length and breadth of the room where Bruce had slept. He breathes the air. He picks up and puts down soaps in the bathroom, and books in the bedroom. 

He thumbs open a random volume of poetry. _Porque quiero dormer el sueño de las manzanas,_ he reads, _para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra._

_Because I want to sleep the sleep of apples_   
_and learn a lament that will cleanse me of earth;_   
_because I want to live with that dark child_   
_who wanted to cut out his heart on the sea._

Tony tosses the book back on the bad and cuts his eyes toward the distant mountains. He’s never had much use for poetry, anyway. 

A day passes, and then another. He hears crashing outside. Low, agonized moaning. Sometimes he thinks he hears the distant tumble of stones, but that’s impossible. The mountains are too far away. 

One night he wakes up and Bruce is sitting on the end of his bed, his solid form clad in rags. His hair is wild. He’s facing the wall and his hands are folded in his lap. His body is preternaturally still. 

Tony struggles half upright. Bruce inhales sharply, and the air around them crystallizes. Draws tense as a bowstring. Tony freezes. 

If he moves, the world will collapse. 

Bruce breathes, for several long moments. He rubs his palms together, and in the silence Tony can hear how dry they are. 

Finally, in a voice so faint it doesn’t even qualify as a whisper, Bruce says, “There’s something wrong with me.” 

Tony knows better than to laugh. He thins his lips. 

“I thought I could find an answer. Out there. And there was. But it was just…more blood. More death.” His head turns, slightly, and Tony can now see his profile, faintly illuminated by moonlight. 

“I don’t understand what’s happening to me.” 

And Tony, genius Tony, mastermind engineer, Tony Stark who is universally recognized as one of the smartest men on the planet, doesn’t say anything. 

Doesn’t move when Bruce gets up, leveraging himself off the end of the bed with aching slowness. 

Doesn’t call out when Bruce gently opens the door to the patio, and doesn’t speak when he shuts the door behind himself with a quiet click. 

He just watches a monster boil up out of his skin, and disappear into the night. 

After that he gets out of bed, and breaks everything he can get his hands on. 

______________________

_“But he came back,”_ Pepper protests, as Tony is shrugging on his jacket. 

“And you think, what, he’s like a cat, if I just wait around he’ll show up again when he gets hungry?” 

_“Hey, don’t get upset with me because you’re mad at yourself. Just don’t take any unnecessary risks, Tony, okay?”_

“I’ll be very safe. Completely at ease in the wilderness. Birds will follow me and sing, Disney-style. There may be frolicking involved.” 

She puts her head on the side in a patented Pepper expression of exasperation. 

_“Tony.”_

He waves his hands around. “Okay. I promise. Utmost care will be exercised. But I can’t let this go on. So I have to go and get him.” 

_“Are you sure he’s even still out there?”_

Tony turns his head. The sun’s just coming up, a gleam of brilliant gold over the mountains. 

“Oh yeah,” he says grimly, “He’s still out there.” 

______________________

This time there’s no confusion about where to go. Tony follows the trail for miles. It backtracks and crisscrosses, it descends into deep valleys and climbs steep slopes. It rambles in some places, along streams and through fields, and in other it cuts a merciless swath through the trees, flattening everything in its path. 

Tony thinks at times that he can smell the Hulk, that distinctive combination of ozone and burning and some _other,_ alien quality that’s not quite organic and not exactly otherworldly. And there’s something else there too, something very much like ordinary human fear. 

But he might be projecting that last bit. 

He listens. There are noises, sometimes. Distant crashing. The long slow creaking of trees leaning into one another. A rumbling like a train that goes on far too long. 

Tony sets his jaw and fixes his eyes on the distant peaks. 

He presses on. 

______________________

_And the light is terrible._

_And it can’t be cut out._

_It can’t be torn from this body._

_And the things that happened weren’t real._

_But they still_ happened. 

______________________

He starts calling Bruce’s name. As the sun gets lower, he calls and calls. 

He’s miles from the cottage now. Miles from the mountains too, because things like that are always father than they seem. But he knows he can’t make it back to shelter before sunset. Which means he’s going to probably be spending the night outdoors. 

This will be Bruce’s fourth night spent outside in this place. (Tony has no idea how many nights total Bruce has spent outdoors, over the course of his existence in exile. It’s one of those things he tries not to think about too much.) 

So he calls. He yells himself hoarse for an hour and then, as the last glimmers of sunlight are fading in the sky and he’s standing on the edge of a ravine that he’s pretty sure a giant green sonovabitch carved not too long ago, he flops heavily on the ground and curses in a vaguely Tom Waits-ish/Cookie Monster-esque voice. 

It’s too dark to really construct any sort of shelter now. He’s got a long night ahead of him, napping against a tree. 

He does his best to get comfortable. He’s getting too old for this sort of thing, really. His body’s not going to thank him in the morning, when he wakes up with roots jabbing him in the back and a pinecone for a pillow. 

He hopes he doesn’t get bit by some random forest spider. What kinds of spiders do they have in upstate New York? At least there won’t be any night snakes. Heh. Night snakes. He has the worst sense of humor in the world. 

He gnaws vengefully on a protein bar. When he finds Bruce again he’s going to force-feed the man about fifty of the things. Whatever it takes to get him back up to a semi-respectable weight. 

The darkness settles around him. It’s August in upstate New York, he’s not at risk of dying from exposure. He’s just going to be really goddamn uncomfortable, and probably eaten alive by mosquitoes. 

“It’s not really a hardship,” he mutters to himself, then twists around and shouts into the darkness behind him, “You hear that, Bruce? A little dirt and dark isn’t gonna send me running back inside!” 

There’s no answer, but he has the sudden, distinct impression that the darkness is listening. 

He swallows, but it’s only because he had a bit of protein bar lodged in his throat. 

That’s all. 

______________________

Twilight deepens to full night. Nocturnal sounds fill the air. He’s reminded all over again how underdeveloped human senses are. He doesn’t turn his phone on, and he feels naked and alone, surrounded on every side by profound nothingness. Not the cold closeness of a cave, but an awful vastness, a black immensity of a world without boundaries. If he stretched out his hands, Tony knows, there would be no walls. He’s not even sure he could find a tree, in the disorienting, directionless dark. 

He doesn’t try. Just keeps his hands folded in his lap. Reminds himself that he’s not agoraphobic, despite his tendencies to fight aliens while encased completely in metal, and to lock himself in high-walled workspaces where the light is mostly artificial. 

He watches the stars come out. He doesn’t remember there being so many, but he can’t deny their presence now, as masses of the things fill the sky with light from billions of years ago. He doesn’t know much about individual stars, but he guesses that most of them are dead by now. 

“Hey Bruce, are you seeing this?” he addresses the air, “You’d think by now we’d all be living in domed cities, where none of this creepy zombie extraterrestrial light can get to us. You know, it’s supposed to be the era of flying cars. I guess I’d better get on that, huh? 

There’s no response, here in this darkness. Tony chucks a few random stones. The instant they leave his hand, they might as well cease to exist. All except one, which startles something in the undergrowth. He hears a squeak and then an indignant rustling. 

“I know you’re out there, Bruce,” Tony mutters at the void. There’s no answer. 

At some point he dozes off. When he wakes up, the moon is high, a tiny sliver, like the fingernail clipping of God. 

There is a very faint crackle from close by. All of Tony’s muscles still, and goosebumps sweep his body. He stops breathing. 

Another noise reaches his ears, as faint as the first: leaves being gently crushed. Branches moved aside. 

The smell hits him then—ozone, fire, death. 

Consciously, logically, Tony knows he doesn’t need to freeze like an animal. But there are some responses wired deep into the brain, and one of them is the natural reaction to being hunted in the dark by something huge. 

He forces himself to exhale. His throat has gone dry. 

From the dark comes a cough, and then a low groan. It’s the sound of an animal. It’s primeval. 

Tony can’t triangulate by sound. His puny human body doesn’t have those abilities. He turns his head toward the noise but then there’s a faint rustle to the left and he thinks that the Hulk has moved. He thinks he’s probably circling around. 

Lots of people have underestimated the Hulk in the past, he knows. Have looked and seen nothing but a huge, bone-crushing monster. Have failed, again and again, to grasp the entire picture. 

Tony shuts his eyes. He stops breathing. He focuses entirely on the smallest noises that percolate through the nighttime stillness. His skin shivers—an animalistic response he forces himself to ignore. 

His mind draws the shape. Something huge, slightly hunched, a shadow against the stars. Not raging, though—not screaming. Stalking, perhaps. But carefully. An argument could actually be made for…gently. 

“Bruce,” he murmurs, through barely moving lips. “Hey, buddy.” 

The smell is suddenly stronger, and Tony’s nostrils flare in the abrupt wash of it: burning wires and dirt, human fear and sweat, something oddly sweet and the peppery character of decay. A faint breath ruffles his hair. And it’s suddenly very, very warm. 

He wonders how fast the Hulk can actually move. He has a sudden vision of enormous hands, reaching out, grasping hold….

“Hey,” Tony says, “Hi.” 

There’s silence then, for a long time. But the warmth doesn’t dissipate and neither does the smell. The invisible presence remains, long enough that Tony’s muscle start to ache with the pain of not moving. 

Then comes the tiniest of noises, a bat swooping low and emitting its barely-audible cry. The enormous presence snorts roughly and, before Tony can react, surges away. 

“No—shit!” He leaps to his feet and goes to sprint after in the direction of movement, but almost immediately his foot catches on some invisible obstacle and he hits the ground, hard. 

He slams a fist into the earth in frustrated rage, and knows he’s fortunate that he doesn’t strike anything pointy or venomous. 

For the rest of the night he doesn’t try to leave his precarious spot. He dozes, in snatches, and once or twice he thinks he hears the noise of some huge body moving through the forest. But it might just be a dream. 

______________________

He opens his eyes in the hazy grey of early morning. His vision is blurry and a headache is crowding into his skull. The environment around him is a cluster of indistinct blobs that, in a few hours, will become stones and trees, bushes and vines. He blinks and faintly registers a spider’s web, barely inches from his nose. He opens and shuts his eyes, slowly. 

Nearby, leaves crackle. A body is pushing its way through the underbrush. Not a large body. Something smallish, like a deer. 

Or a man. 

Tony brings up a hand to rub his face, tangles his fingers in the spider web, and hisses in irritation. _Nature._ He flails forward and, half-falling, turns to look at the source of the intruding noise. 

Bruce is standing about twenty yards away, barely illuminated in the poor light. He’s mostly naked, and dirty. His hair is matted. He’s holding something in one closed fist. 

The words, _Morning, sunshine,_ range themselves behind Tony’s teeth, and he nearly bites his tongue strangling them back. 

Bruce says, “What day is it?” His voice sounds hollow, echoing down a long tunnel. 

“Uh,” Tony screws up his face, “Wednesday.” 

Bruce inhales and nods, jerkily and far too long to look like he’s fully in control of his actions. 

“Come over here,” Tony says. He wishes he could say that he’s surprised when Bruce turns suddenly huge, terrified eyes to him. The other man shakes his head. 

“No,” he says hoarsely. 

The light’s rapidly getting brighter. Tony always forgets how fast dawn comes on, out in the world. He can’t see the mountains, but he knows that the first gleam of gold is cresting the peaks, clear and bright, piercing the cool grey veil of sleep and confusion. 

“Bruce,” he wheedles, “Come on.” 

“No!” Bruce bites out, and lifts an imploring hand, gesturing at the empty space between them like a penitent sinner before an invisible god. “How can you…?” he trails off and his eyes fly around the area. Tony can see the whites surrounding his irises. He fumbles vaguely at the spots where his pockets would be, as if he’s searching for his glasses. 

“Bruce.” Tony unfolds himself from the ground, wiping away the shreds of webbing and the tears of exhaustion that have collected at the corners of his eyes in the past few minutes. Bruce holds up his closed fist between them, like a shield. 

“Don’t,” he says, his voice laced with horror. Tony squints at him. 

“Help me out here, Bruce,” he pleads. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know how to help.” 

Bruce takes deep, deep breaths through his nose. Once, twice, three times. His head jerks spasmodically, not in any sort of gesture but in the way of a man bordering on genuine panic. Tony can see that his lips are nearly white, and cracked in places. There are dark spots that might be blood. 

Finally, very faintly, he whispers, “There’s a dead man right there.” 

Tony shuts his eyes. He feels like someone’s just flung an entire bucket of ice water over him. 

He says, “Where, Bruce?” 

_“Stop saying my name!”_

Tony opens his eyes. _“Where?”_ he demands. 

“You can’t _smell_ it?” Bruce demands, word fracturing at the edges. He waves again at the space between them, desperately, “You don’t see…?” But he trails off into strangled silence. Because he knows. He knows. He can’t not. 

“Bruce,” Tony says again, helpless to say anything else, “There’s nothing there.” 

He repeats it, for good measure. 

“There’s nothing.” 

______________________

Getting Bruce back to the cottage is a confused, exhausting trek through fading greyness and bursts of awful radiance. Bruce suffers himself to be led, mostly because he seems to have given up caring what’s happening around him. He keeps a tight hold on whatever’s in his hand, though. Tony ruthlessly steers and shoves and pushes him into valleys and up hills, along ridges and across shallow streams. Bruce is barefoot, pathetically hanging on to the tatters of his ruined clothes, seemingly on autopilot. 

Tony’s very pointedly not thinking about anything beyond the present. Not an hour from now, not ten minutes from now, not ten seconds from now. All that matters is getting one foot in front of the other, and making Bruce do the same. He can’t help but cast his eyes across Bruce’s face once or twice while he does so, though, and finds himself wondering if the brilliant mind behind the gray skin and glassy eyes has somehow been irreparably broken. 

“It’s gonna be okay,” Tony catches himself saying at one point, and then has to fight the urge to slap himself in the face. 

They make it back to the cottage when morning is fading to the buttery warmth of a summer afternoon. Bruce has drifted off completely inside his own head, and Tony has to grab his elbow to stop him ambling on past the patio. 

“Dammit, Bruce, could you try to at least make an effort here?” he bites. Bruce nods minutely, but Tony’s starting to think the movement is just another tic that he hadn’t witnessed before. 

“Inside,” Tony growls, “Now.” And he pushes Bruce up and through the door, into the cool dark of the kitchen. Bruce trembles faintly, incongruously, and a weird empty smile flits across his face. 

“Jesus,” Tony tells him, “I am so far out of my fucking depth here, you have no idea.” 

“Sorry. Sorry.” 

“Shut up.” And he’s not trying to be cruel. But Tony Stark doesn’t understand gentleness all that well. He knows it. Everybody knows it. 

It’s never been a problem, up until now. 

“Do you remember where your room is?” he asks, with little hope. Bruce smiles again, vacantly, and hunches his shoulders slightly as if he’s expecting a blow. Tony fights a snarl and slaps a hand to the back of Bruce’s neck, and steers him down the hall. 

They’re almost to the door when Bruce gives a little sigh, eyes fluttering half closed. His face is slack, strangely relaxed. His lips don’t move and the voice that comes from his throat is thin and thready. Alien. 

“There was blood everywhere,” he breathes, “There was a man, and there was so much blood.” 

“Yeah, I know, I was there, but I told you—”

“It didn’t happen. No one was there. The blood and…the body. No. It wasn’t there. No one was there.” 

Tony withdraws his hand, slowly. He angles his body away, tries for a better look at Bruce’s face. 

“It didn’t happen,” Bruce’s strange, remote voice continues, “I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there.” 

“Okay,” Tony agrees, because at this point he’d agree with anything Bruce says, “I believe you.” 

And it’s been a long time coming, he supposes, when Bruce’s eyes snap to Tony’s face, and they’re wide and lucid and terrified for the fraction of an instant before they roll up into his skull and his body collapses like a sack of bones that Tony’s too slow to catch. Bruce’s head bounces on the gleaming wooden floorboards with a dull _thunk._

His arm flops out and his hand falls open. The thing he’d been holding so tightly tumbles out and skitters across the floor. Tony reaches out and picks it up. 

It’s a bird skull, perfect and fragile and undamaged. 

Tony swears, because he doesn’t know what else to do.


	5. Extinguish

**5: Extinguish**

Tony sits for a long time in front of the files he’s pulled on Banner, and the Hulk. He finds himself counting his breaths as the house sinks into silence. The night passes slowly. Bruce sleeps, and Tony talks to Pepper.

“I think he hallucinated,” he tells her around two in the morning, “I think he hallucinated everything. He was just…seeing things that weren’t there.” 

_“Jesus,”_ she says faintly.

“And now I…I’ve got all this information.” He waves a hand at the nearest displays, the multitudes of open files. “But it’s practically useless. And SHIELD has psyche profiles—”

_“Well, that should help.”_

“Except it’s profiles, _plural._ People have done _postdoc_ work on Banner’s psyche, and none of them line up with each other. It’s not that I don’t have enough information, it’s that I have _too much,_ and I don’t think any of it’s gonna help me.” 

Pepper sighs. She paces away from the camera for a moment, out of the frame. He hears her rummaging around off-screen, and when she returns it’s with both long hands wrapped around a steaming mug. Chamomile, probably, or some other herbal infusion appropriate for late nights. She insists on referring to them as _tisanes,_ because _That, Tony, is the appropriate nomenclature._

 _“He came to you,”_ she says, when another minute of silence has elapsed and Tony has fallen to fiddling with Bruce’s creepy bird skull. “He trusts you.” 

Tony takes a deep breath. 

“I just…I don’t want to do any more damage.” 

_“If it were anybody else, I’d say he should be in a hospital, at least until he’s stabilized.”_

“Yeah.” He turns the tiny, fragile bit of bone over in his hands. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” 

After they say their rambling goodbyes and disconnect, Tony goes back to sifting through the incredibly useless psyche profiles. There are a few features, at least, shared in common among the majority, though since he suspects that their respective authors were at various points either competing or collaborating with each other (or some unholy combination of the two), he suspects it’s more a case of repetition than anything based on evidence. 

Facts are still facts, though, and in the midst of the psychobabble cross-talk he picks out a few key details. 

Tony fumbles around until he gets his hands on a tablet, and starts taking notes. 

______________________

_All light collapses, cascading downward._

_All constructs break down._

_Stars burn blindly in the void for billions of years_

_and then die._

______________________

His body doesn’t hurt. 

Bruce rolls out of bed and rubs at his face. His feet hit the floor and his toes curl automatically, though the polished boards aren’t cold. 

His muscles and bones feel wrapped in cotton. He chafes his hands together absently and notes the dirt caked in the lines of his palms, and under his nails. Watches it cascade slowly toward the floor. He barely registers the sensations. 

It all seems very far away. 

He looks around the room. There are books scattered in random places. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t remember putting them there. 

He goes into the bathroom and turns on the water. The walls, he notes, are white. He supposes he must have known that before, but it’s somehow more apparent now. He stands in the middle of the room for a long time, staring at the wall. It’s easy. It’s so easy. And…it doesn’t hurt. His arms hang slack, his fingers curl loosely. His body is a two-dimensional smear across another plane of existence, a blur of nothing-very-much at all. 

It’s not unfamiliar, this state of non-presence. It’s comfortable and…safe. A warm emptiness, dry as bones and soft as ashes, filling all the empty spaces of his head, dampening external sensations. 

When the room starts to fill with steam he wrinkles his nose in irritation. He plucks at the places where his buttons should be and dimly registers that there’s nothing there. Looking down, he sees that he’s practically naked, shredded bits of material hanging off his bones. Looking back he sees that he’s left a trail of dirt and leaves and grass all the way from the bedroom. 

His lips quirk, and it’s a distant sensation that doesn’t belong to him. A mechanical shift in the artificial facial features of a well-constructed articulated marionette. 

One eye stings and tears up and he wipes at it with the back of his hand. Tosses the rags in a pile in the corner and climbs into the shower. Bathing is awkward and difficult; his hands don’t seem to have fingers, exactly—someone’s replaced them with thick, clumsy mittens. He fumbles a bottle of shampoo and drops it and then stands staring at it for a good five minutes as water pounds down on his head and runs into his eyes. 

He can’t move. His body’s been filled with air, like a balloon. Water pours down, and pours down, and pours down. His skin is oddly tight. He shuts his eyes and lets out a tiny breath. 

There is a light, inside. A small banked fire, a tiny star. A pivot point. He could flip over right now. Give up this skin to someone else. 

Bruce Banner could just…go away. 

The light flickers, and burns. He stands for a long time, waiting for what he doesn’t know. 

Finally he opens his eyes, and picks up the shampoo. 

______________________

“Pepper,” Tony says distractedly, as he pages through three reports with one hand and makes notes with the other, “I need you to pull all the files you can find on Brian Banner.” 

_“Why not have JARVIS do it?”_

“No, I really need you to look them over for me.” 

_“Okay. Okay.”_

______________________

He sits on the end of the bed with his hands on his knees, fingers curled slightly inward. He’s barely breathing. Air comes and goes lightly from his lungs. Time flickers at the edge of his awareness with the same lightness. 

There might be something he should be doing. Faintly, he thinks that there might be. 

He should want something. He should go out into the world. But his muscles are distant and strange, and the slightest movement disrupts the glasslike clarity of his equilibrium. 

So he stays where he is. 

______________________

Tony sits back in his chair and brings the tablet display to the fore. He’s scribbled all over it—a three dimensional model rendered in two dimensions, only this time instead of schematics and mass/force equations it’s full of words. Terminology. 

_Disordered thinking_

_Dissociative disorder_

_MENTAL ILLNESS_

_Trauma, violent upbringing_  
 _—witness violent death of mother_

_Dissociative amnesia_  
 _—localized amnesia: lose all events within window of time_  
 _—selective amnesia: retain small parts of events w/in a period of time_

_Psychotic-like symptoms (hallucinations—visual, auditory, etc.)_

_Anxiety, compulsions, rituals_

_Depersonalization_

_Compartmentalization_

_Depression_

_Suicidal tendencies_

_Mood swings_

_Brain physical matrix_

He glares at the collection of phrases. Until now, these words have meant very little to him. Broken people haven’t ever been his forte; as far as Tony knows, there’s no way his expertise can repair that kind of damage. 

He’s underlined _Mental Illness_ twice. As if that will make it somehow more solid, and bring it into the realm of the actual, the real. Make it something he can fix with a screwdriver and a hammer and an acetylene torch. 

Tony makes fists and listens to the dry skin of his fingers rub against his palms. 

He could erase everything, right now. Wash his hands of it. Pack Bruce off to SHIELD, maybe, or some other organization that would theoretically be equipped to handle this situation. 

He could. He could. 

It would be _easy._

______________________

He’s staring at a blank section of wall when something interrupts. 

_(The sky overhead )_

It’s a small thing, a tiny thing. A moment of red, streaking across white emptiness. _(The sky overhead is)_ But it makes his breath stutter, his eyelids flutter rapidly. _(The sky overhead is dark)_ Pain follows the smear of brightness like an afterimage of bright and awful light, and he flinches away, raising a hand toward his eyes. 

_The sky overhead is dark,_

_huge and_

_starless._

“No,” he says, but the word is like a globule of blood, sputtering from his lips, thick and wet. 

He inhales, trembling. Over the surface of his skin, a light rustles. Dry like the wind in the leaves, bright like sunlight on green. 

The red is a warning. 

_Hide,_ the light tells him, _You will not be safe._

Outside, the trees bow their heads. 

______________________

Very carefully, on a scrap of paper that might be a receipt or a bar napkin or maybe a bit of a lease he signed and then forgot about, Tony writes the words _Dissociative Identity Disorder._

He forms each letter with delicate precision. The final result is very unlike his own handwriting, lacking the firmness, the surety that defines all his equations and declarations. Yet they’re no less real for all that. No less terrifying. 

He sits and stares down at them. He sits, and the shadows lengthen around him. 

When the communication from Pepper flashes across the screen, he doesn’t look up for a long time. 

______________________

His hands, his fingers, are covered in blood. Red all over his palms, covering the skin, up to his wrists. Spattering the insides of his arms. 

He can’t move. His body is sliding in two sections, flat glass panels moving apart. He’s staring at his hands but he can’t move them. The muscles, the electrical impulses, won’t match up. His fingers twitch, helplessly. 

“No,” falls out of his mouth, again, thicker and more garbled than before. And it’s wrong, and it hurts, and he can see it, a bright agony from the corner of his eye cutting through the thick white that’s encased him. It hurts, it _hurts,_ like tearing a bone out of its socket. Like a tendon, a muscle, stretched and breaking. It _hurts_ and his hands fly to his head without his volition, but he can’t touch it because his head and his hands are in two different dimensions, sliding next to each other but unable to interact. 

A panting sob rasps out of his throat and he doesn’t know why, only it hurts, it _hurts,_ why does it _hurt so goddamn much?_

His eyes slide shut, he thinks, but he can’t stop seeing: the walls and the room, the light, the light from elsewhere. And the blood. The dead thing, the pile of broken flesh, the _body._

The. 

The light says, _I was there._

And yes, he thinks, that’s right. _Someone_ was there. 

Someone _else._

 _But not me,_ he thinks, and feels his hands press against the planes of his skull as if they’re walls he can shore up. _Not me, I wasn’t there._

It hurts. 

_I wasn’t there._

He doesn’t know what he means, _where_ he means (what the body is, who it was). Only that it’s red, and bright, and awful, and it _hurts_ and he wasn’t there so _why does it hurt,_ how can 

How can something that happened to _somebody else_ hurt him now? 

Hurt so much? 

He might be on his knees by the bed, he doesn’t know. The pain won’t stop. Wordless and voiceless and vivid and foreign it tears through every ounce of softness, blows through every shred of security he’s ever managed to wrap around himself. Fragments fly away in the blast. 

He doesn’t understand. He _doesn’t know what’s happening._ He gags and doesn’t know why. He has a memory of a woman gibbeted in a shack in Southeast Asia, her guts pouring out, her intestines coiled on the floor. He remembers a man staked to the earth in an abandoned field, ants crawling in and out of his eye sockets. He remembers a body crumpled by a grave marker, blood spattered on stone, froth dribbling from his mouth. He remembers. He remembers. And he doesn’t know _why._

And somewhere a voice comes to him, rattling down a long tunnel, hollow and thin and echoing and re-echoing. A man’s voice. A familiar voice. 

_i read all about your accident_

He clamps his teeth against his lower lip until he tastes salt and iron. 

_it's_  
             _a_  
                 _terrible_  
          _privilege_

He gasps wetly, inhaling blood, and oh it hurts, it hurts and please, please, it hurts and he chants over and over again the only words that matter, the only ones he can remember, the last words left in the universe. 

“I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.” 

______________________

 _“You’re not a doctor, Tony,”_ Pepper demurs, not unkindly. 

“Yeah but…is there a doctor who’s equipped to deal with this? Psychiatrist for superheroes?” 

_“But what you’re saying is…”_

“What I’m saying is I have a workable hypothesis, based on inquiry and evidence—even if it’s not my own. And it gives me a direction to pursue, at least. And that’s not nothing. It’s more than I had going into this, that’s for damn sure.” 

_“But…a dissociative disorder? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”_

Tony raises his eyebrows and doesn’t answer. In the silence that falls, he can practically hear the dominoes falling over in Pepper’s head. 

_“Okay. Okay. I guess, uh, extreme isn’t outside the realm of possibility, here. And…”_ she presses her lips together. Tony sits up straighter. 

“What? You found something? What?” 

She shuffles some papers around, clearly for effect and to buy herself some time. 

Tony says, “You did find something.” 

_“I don’t know. It might be nothing. But, as you said, there’s a history of extreme violence, of, um, of abuse, in Bruce’s past, and…and you asked me to look into his father.”_

“I did.” 

_“Well, his father’s dead.”_

“I know.” His voice is neutral. “I got that bit, and the background of, uh, of abuse, was all in the reports. But I only found one mention of Banner Senior’s death, and that was just a note in an appendix.” 

_“Well, uh. I got the police reports. He died violently. The official report is that it was a mugging gone bad. And. There was a severe head wound.”_

Tony screws up his face. “You, uh, you think that’s significant?” 

_“One way or another, yeah I do. Brian Banner was a monst—”_ she staggers to a halt, and presses her lips together. 

“So what are you thinking? Bruce went all green and smushed dear old dad’s head? But there shouldn’t have been anything left of him but a smear, in that case.” 

_“Well, and also that’s impossible, since Brian Banner died years before the accident that created the Hulk. And the coroner definitely indicated that the wound had the appearance of a blow delivered unintentionally.”_

“Huh.” Tony looks down at the bits of papers and two tablets and the bird skull scattered across his desk. “And you think Bruce might have been involved?” 

_“Well the official report stated that Bruce only found his father after he’d been deceased for some time. No one ever investigated him. But if you’re really set on pursuing this…”_ She leaves the sentence hanging. 

Tony passes a hand over his face. He’s feeling vaguely nauseous, but that’s been an ongoing situation for the past five hours or so. 

“It’s impossible to look at something like this…” he begins, and then falters. “I mean I—it’s…” His hands grasp vaguely at the air, as if he can take hold of the nameless horror in front of him, embodied in the reams of sterile reports and dry suppositions. “I thought I knew what men were capable of…”

 _“It’s the fact that it’s a person you know,”_ Pepper supplies, _“That the data have a human face, that the experiences were real. It’s—these things are. I remember not too long ago that the media had a fascination with this sort of story, with, well, dramatizations of abuse and attendant mental illness. There were constant adaptations and books and…lurid depictions of horrific suffering. But those were just…”_

“They weren’t really real. Because…”

_“Because they weren’t really happening—they were just things you saw on a screen. But, Tony.”_

“I know.” He inhales deeply and looks down. Swallows back another wave of nausea. “Bruce _is_ real. And all these things…they really happened. To him.” 

_“Be careful, Tony.”_

He nods, and manages to dredge up a smile for her from somewhere. 

“I will. Um. Promise.” 

And that’s when the screaming starts. 


	6. Monster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ☠ **WARNING: SERIOUSLY TRIGGERING CONTENT** ☠

****

**6: Monster**

_Tony Stark is on TV._

_Bruce isn't really listening. The TV is outside the clinic, near the door, and a handful of local kids have gathered around, taking a break from fetching water, running errands, or watching younger siblings. A few are in their uniforms, returning from the school in the next village._

_Stark is blathering, as he usually does. The original audio has been overdubbed, but is still faintly audible, and given Tony's—Stark's—penchant for mile-a-minute uninflected diatribes, the entire thing is vaguely surreal and extremely difficult to follow, in either language._

_"He's so weird," one of the kids announces, to murmurs of assent from the others. In the cool shadows of the clinic, Bruce quirks a smile._

_“Hey,” the little girl says, swinging her legs on the short stool and kicking up dust, “You’re from America.”_

_“Sure am,” he agrees, as he stoops to swab her arm with alcohol._

_“Do you know him?”_

_“Who?” he asks distractedly, turning to pick up the vaccination needle from the low table._

_“_ Him _,” she says exasperatedly, as if the doctor is being deliberately obtuse just to irritate her. “_ Iron Man. _”_

_“I—oh,” he startles, doesn’t know why, and his hand jerks and nearly knocks the needle to the ground. “Uh, no. America…America is pretty big.”_

_“Oh,” she says, and then fixes him with large round eyes in a suddenly shrewd face._

_“I don’t believe you,” she says._

_He rocks back a step. Unsure of the reason. Outside, Stark’s voice is tinny and flat and bilingually unintelligible._

_“Oh, I…I did meet him, actually,” he fumbles. “Once.”_

_“What did he say?”_

_“He, uh, he poked me with a stick.”_

_The little girl shrieks with laughter. Her older brother sticks his head in, briefly, and Bruce waves him away. A faint sheen of sweat is breaking out on his skin. He has the brief sense that he’s standing in two places at once, except that they’re both the same place._

_“Then what happened!” she demands._

_Slowly, he picks up the vaccination needle, kneels down beside her and gently grasps her arm. She stills her squirming._

_Bruce says, doing his best to compress the entirety of their interactions on the Helicarrier and Tony’s incessant needling into something that a six-year-old child can understand. “He told me to, um, to be true to myself. That…I needed to try harder, and not hide from wha—from who I am.”_

_Gently, he slides the needle under her skin, and depresses the plunger._

_Later, when the girl leaves, skipping beside her brother and chattering a mile a minute while he completely ignores every word she says, Bruce waves._

_Then he locks up the clinic and heads back home._

_On the way there, he stops at the market to pick up some milk._

______________________

He’s afraid to put his hand on Bruce’s shoulder. He doesn’t know what to do, what touch or action might bring out the Hulk and tear the entire building down around them. 

God, he’s dealing with a bomb in human form, an ongoing explosion frozen in time. 

He squats and then kneels, puts his hands on the cold floorboards, fingers splayed. Ducks his head close to Bruce’s shaggy curls. 

“Hey,” he starts, weakly, and clears his throat and tries again. “Hey, Bruce, c’mon, I just need to see your eyes— can you lift your head for me? C’mon, please.” 

He’s pleading because what he really wants to do is to grab the hair at the back of the other man’s skull and wrench him upright. Whatever it takes to put them back somewhere in the realm of normal. 

Tony has no idea if Bruce hears him. He watches helplessly as another spasm rocks his body, stiffening all his muscles and tightening the fists clutching at his skull, an instant before all the tendons in his neck stand out and he opens his mouth on another agonized scream. 

Tony’s heard a lot of screams in his life. It’s not something he’s real happy about. But he’s having trouble parsing this one. There’s nothing in it of the Hulk—it’s desperately human. And it sounds like someone in raw physical agony. 

He has to do something. He has to _try._

“Bruce, goddammit…” he leans forward and before he can talk himself out of it, rests one hand on each of Bruce’s shoulders. 

The reaction is instantaneous. Bruce stiffens, then jerks violently away, slamming into the side of the bed and shunting it a foot and a half closer to the wall of windows. His legs jerk spasmodically and one hand flails and claws at the air. 

“This is—fuck! Bruce! _Bruce!”_

It’s terrible. Tony’s watching a man whose mind is _eating itself._

 _Mental illness,_ he thinks wildly, _Illness,_ sickness, _oh god._

Bruce screams again, ramming the heels of his palms against his temples, and Tony can see his face and see that there’s blood on his lips, and shit, shit, in the whites of his eyes too, he’s burst veins in his eyes, somehow. 

His fingers claw at the sides of his skull. Tony reaches again, tries to get through the flailing limbs. 

“St—stop it, you’re gonna—Bruce for the love of— _please!”_

Bruce’s body heaves, spine arching up, a posture vaguely reminiscent of his transformations into the Hulk. But there’s no corresponding rush of green, and Tony watches in horror as the skin along Bruce’s arms starts to split down the middle, long red wounds appearing, lips of skin peeling back. Tony sees glistening fat, before the blood starts to ooze. 

“No, God, no, you need to—Bruce you need to look at me, right now, Bruce, _Bruce!”_ He doesn’t hesitate this time, just slaps both hands on either side of the man’s head and clamps down hard on his jaw, fixing him in place, shaking him minutely. “Look at me, dammit! It’s me, it’s Tony, you’re fine, everything’s fine! You’re safe, it’s safe, I promise you’re safe!” 

A low moan leaks out of Bruce’s mouth, along with a string of bloody saliva. His fingers spasm weakly. His eyes roll like those of a terrified animal. 

“You’re going to be okay,” Tony says, as firmly as he can while masking the panicked horror clawing up his esophagus. “You need to calm down, you’re going to—your body’s gonna eat itself from the inside out.” 

The moan becomes a familiar, dragging groan. Bruce’s eyes are rolling up completely into his skull. 

“Bruce, it’s Tony. It’s Tony. It’s okay, you need to come back. Be okay. Just. Please.” He tries to swallow but his throat is dry with terror. “You have to stop. Please stop. You have to.” 

______________________

_There is_

_a light_

_(a banked fire)_

_He could_

_give up this skin_

_but the shape is wrong, the construction, the matrix, it’s breaking down_

_(what’s happening what’s happening what’s happening)_

_and the things that happened weren’t real._

_(but they were. they were.)_

______________________

His skin is slick with blood but Tony holds on anyway, because he doesn’t know what else to do. He clutches Bruce’s body to his chest in a relentless embrace, his arms locked across the other man’s ribcage and his right hand clamped firmly on his left wrist in a parody of a rescue grip. 

Bruce heaves against him but his strength is mostly human and Tony redoubles his efforts, straining every muscle in his own puny mortal frame. 

“Bruce,” he gasps, “Bruce, where’s the Hulk?” 

Bruce chokes wordlessly, smacking the knuckles of one hand against the floor. And he says the first coherent word Tony has heard from him since he stepped into the room. 

_“…gone…”_ Bruce gasps out. 

“What are you—” Tony breaks off, flabbergasted, unable to grasp the Bruce’s meaning. “That’s not _possible.”_

The other man chokes out an agonized sob, squeezing his eyes shut. 

_“Ggh…”_

“Bruce?” 

His thrashing stills, and Tony releases him carefully, unlocking his fingers one by one. His muscles creak with the motion. 

“You have to—” he doesn’t want to say the words, but they fall out of his mouth anyway. “You need to calm down. You’re _okay.”_

“I’m not…” Bruce garbles a syllable like a man spitting out a hunk of raw, wet flesh. He leans forward, drooling pink saliva. His eyelids flicker. Tony catches flashes of his eyes rolling up. 

“I’m not—”

The words rattle around the room. His skin has stopped splitting, but the fresh wounds continue to ooze blood. 

_Radioactive_ blood, but Tony can’t worry about that now. 

“Bruce, you’re oka—”

“I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.” 

Bruce opens his eyes. Tony inhales a sharp breath. 

“I’m not _here.”_

Bruce makes a tiny grotesque noise that might be a laugh. His eyes are green, irises and sclera faintly luminescent. Tony watches as tears collect in the corners of his eyes and run down his face. 

Tony shifts forward, toward Bruce, reaching out. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he does know that it’s _very very bad._

“Bruce—” he begins, and has a moment to register those eerie eyes flashing to his face. 

He barely feels the blow when it strikes him in the chest. 

He sees brilliant lights when he slams into the far wall, his head striking the wood with a concussive noise. 

After that, he doesn’t see anything. 

______________________

_This is how the man dies._

_Push him._

_Push him._

_And he dies._

______________________

(Lots of people have underestimated the Hulk in the past.) 

Tony breathes, shallowly. It hurts. His neck feels like a sack full of ground glass. Every movement refracts light up his spinal cord and projects it across the insides of his eyelids. He breathes, and only notices after a moment the thin noises leaking out of his mouth. 

_“Fffuck,”_ he groans, eyes flickering open, letting the late afternoon sunlight in. He hasn’t been unconscious for long—a few seconds at most. The air reeks of blood. 

He swallows. Saliva fills his mouth. Nausea floods his system, rushes up his throat, and he rolls on his side, planting one hand flat on the floorboards. They’re slick with warm fluids. He gags, retches. 

In the corner, something shuffles. Someone coughs, and groans. Tony forces himself upright. He doesn’t puke. 

Across the room, Bruce is staggering to his feet. He sways like a sailor stepping ashore for the first time in months. His eyes find Tony’s for a moment, before he shuts them and wipes at his face, smearing blood across his mouth. He’s covered in gore, and as Tony watches in horror droplets of red collect on the tips of the fingers of his left hand and spatter on the ground. 

“Hey, Bruce,” he whispers, weakly. 

The other man looks at him, briefly, and gives a minute shake of his head. It’s the same gesture Tony’d seen him use before, except…no. It’s different. Somehow, the character of it is different. 

“What did you do?” Bruce rasps. His eyes aren’t green anymore. Everything about him is utterly human in appearance, except for the great bleeding rents in his flesh, and the blood. 

There’s so much blood. 

“Are you—” Tony starts, and doesn’t get to finish because Bruce is suddenly across the room, inhumanly fast, and he’s grabbed fistfuls of Tony’s jacket and hauled him off the floor and slammed him against the wall. 

“What did you _do?”_ Bruce demands again, voice stronger now, and shaking. “Who the _hell do you think you are?”_

Tony coughs. “Bruce, I don’t—”

The other man leans in close, baring his teeth. They’re covered in blood. Tony stares, transfixed. 

“It’s _your fault.”_

His voice is deep. Too deep for Bruce’s. Not deep enough for the Hulk’s. 

Tony’s brain won’t come completely online. Whatever’s happening, he’s having trouble fully engaging with it. None of it feels real. He feels a smile trying to creep onto his face. 

“You’re not gonna hurt me,” he tries, “Bruce.” 

The other man sneers, and it makes his face alien and unfamiliar. “Why, because you’re a ‘huge fan?’ You think I need to get in touch with my _inner rage monster?_ And you’re not afraid. You’re not afraid, are you, Tony Stark?” 

He doesn’t know what’s happening, but that’s never stopped him before. 

“So it _did_ bother you,” he tries, and Bruce shakes his head, presses a bloody finger square over Tony’s lips. 

“Sh-sh-sh,” he says, and drops him unceremoniously on the floor. Tony hits the ground bonelessly, and Bruce squats beside him, elbows on his thighs, head cocked to one side. 

“...s’wrong,” Tony gasps, so faintly he can barely hear himself. 

“Don’t fade out on me,” Bruce says, snapping his fingers in Tony’s face, “No, listen. You thought you understood, didn’t you? And that you could make it simple, could make the—the two _halves_ live together in mutual harmony. That they’d learn to hold hands and smile and skip through the flowers together like a, a, a _Coke commercial,_ right? That’s what you said, _it’s a terrible privilege,_ you said, remember that Tony? And the Hulk saved Bruce. Right?” 

Tony’s eyes narrow. Through the swirling pain he still manages to pick out the incongruity in that statement. 

“ _You’re_ Bruce,” he grits out, through his teeth. He’s a little afraid that he’s going to throw up again. 

The man in front of him, the blood-covered man with his friend’s face, smiles slightly, and it’s horrible and empty and bloodstained. 

“No,” he says, with Bruce Banner’s voice, “No, I am _not.”_

______________________

_The man yells, and Bruce flinches. He doesn’t want to fight. Not anymore. He’s so, so tired of fighting._

_The sky overhead is dark, huge and starless. The man (his father) surges forward, still yelling. Veins stand out in his neck, his forehead. His face is dark, mottled with rage. Bruce quails. The man’s voice is like a hammer, bludgeoning the side of his head. Ringing, ringing, and it hurts and Bruce is so small, he’s a man now but he’s still so small._

_He’s always been so small._

_And his father is so large._

______________________

 _“No,”_ Bruce (not-Bruce?) says, grabbing Tony’s hair in a fist and shaking him slightly, “I told you not to fade out on me. This is what you wanted, right? A mutual coming together, a meeting of minds? And it never even occurred to you that there are some things that should _never ever be put together.”_

He releases Tony, bounces his head off the wall. 

“Ung,” Tony groans. 

The other man gets up, paces a few steps away. His hands flicker toward his head, but don’t connect. 

“You can’t imagine how much it hurts,” he says, “To know these things. The way the sky—the way it happened. _Everything_ that happened. To have to _see._ And _remember.”_

Tony inhales with the sudden realization. _The hallucinations, the bodies staked out wherever Bruce went._

He can’t clamp his jaw together fast enough to keep the words, “Your fa—” from choking out. 

Suddenly that bloody grin is back in Tony’s face, brown eyes so wide he can see the red-speckled whites all around the irises. “You think nothing of cost,” the other man growls, and it should be impossible for a man of such average stature to be so ghastly, so genuinely frightening. “It didn’t even _occur_ to you—”

“Bruce—”

A hand belts him across the face. Tony tastes copper. 

_“Stop saying that name!”_

“No!” Tony snarls, head swinging around. “You’re Bruce Banner!” 

“Bruce Banner is _gone!”_ He hits Tony again, then surges to his feet, as Tony lists to one side and spits blood. “You _extinguished_ him! Now, all that’s left, is _me.”_ He growls the last word and stoops to grab Tony by the throat and haul him up. Tony’s feet dangle. 

“You’re not a monster, Bruce,” he gasps, clawing at the fist at his throat. “You or the Hulk—you’re a _person—”_

“The Hulk is not a _person!_ And neither is Banner!” He leans in, squeezing Tony’s esophagus lightly. “They’re _puppets,_ they’re _empty marionettes.”_ A wicked and awful glee suffuses his face. 

“And I,” he continues, “Am going to _rip out your heart.”_

Tony does struggle then, lashing out, and a foot connects with the other man’s midsection hard enough to knock his breath from his body. Except there’s no effect, and that bloody grin remains unchanged. 

“You don’t know what it’s like,” the man says, “To be small, to be powerless.” 

“I—” 

“But I do. _We_ do.” And here for a moment his eyes glaze, and lose their focus. Just for an instant, his head tilts. “To be small. And afraid.” His eyes flicker, briefly. “But I wasn’t—”

His grip slackens slightly, and Tony squirms, but it’s not enough and Bruce—not-Bruce’s—eyes focus sudden and bright. 

“I was there,” he exhales, shakily. _“I_ was there.” 

He rips Tony’s shirt open, viciously, and then stops, confounded by the startling lack of a little circle of light. 

“All gone,” Tony gasps, “Took care…of it.” 

The other man barks a laugh and drops him on the floor, pressing a hand to his sternum and pinning him. 

“You want me to split your ribs apart for you?” he asks. “What happened to the ‘terrible privilege’?” 

Tony hisses through his teeth, feels blood frothing at the corners of his mouth. He stares at the face above him—familiar and so foreign—and words from another day come floating back to him, faint and hollow. 

_What happens_

_if you embrace the monster?_

_If you welcome it inside…_

_what if it never leaves?_

This is not Bruce Banner. 

This is not the Hulk. 

He is in so much trouble. 

______________________

_So many dead_

_So many gone_

_So much washed away, so much rendered meaningless_

_So much blood_

_A world so delicate, so easy to break_

_And people, so frail, so hollow and fragile_

_Meaningless_

(If he closed his hands  
       he could crush the whole world.) 

_It would be easy._

_It would be easy._

______________________

Tony blinks and he’s sitting propped up against the island in the kitchen, where a few days ago he’d sat with Bruce and eaten sandwiches in silence. His eyes focus on the trail of blood staining the pristine tiled floor. The other man must have dragged him, bleeding as he walked. 

A polite cough draws his attention. He lifts his head, with difficulty. 

The other man is sitting cross-legged on the floor just to the side. He looks comfortable, very much at his ease. He’s found a large butcher knife and is holding it in a loose grip. 

Tony has, in recent years during his career as a super hero, been held captive and undergone surgery without anesthetic and been nearly blown up and drowned and shot at and electrocuted and shot at some more and suffocated and swallowed alive by a giant space worm-monster thing, and also shot at. 

He can’t tear his eyes away from the knife. 

It’s very clean, and very bright. 

“This is going to hurt, a little,” the other man says. 

Tony’s throat works involuntarily. He hears the sound of an aborted swallow—a tiny _click._

So many terrible things have happened to him. But the knife is very bright, and very clean. 

“You could beg,” the other man suggests. 

“No.” 

“Mm.” He looks down. “It’s probably better that you don’t.” 

Tony doesn’t answer. 

The other man lifts his head again. “My father used to say, that you should—that w— _I_ should fight. Fight back. To be strong, he said. It’s very important.” 

Tony spits, “Just _fucking do it.”_

The other man runs a thumb along the blade. “He did this once, incidentally. With the knife, in the kitchen. Kneeling over me with his hand on my neck and pushing me down, into the floor. He did it….just to see what I would do, I guess. But I really thought that—I believed him, then. That he would cut out my heart.” 

Tony musters a sneer from somewhere and pastes it across his frozen face. 

“You know, I just cried. And I begged him not to.” He reaches out with his thumb and traces a bloody line up the center of Tony’s chest. “And we— _I_ —” he gives a minute twitch of his head. Laughs quietly. “But that was a long time ago.” 

He leans forward. 

“Do you think you’ll cry, Mister Stark?” 

And _there._ In the other man’s eyes, Tony sees it. A flicker, behind the irises, a moment like a flash of light, a tiny distant star. 

A scream, a scream. 

“This isn’t happening,” Tony says through numb lips. 

The other man gives a faint chuckle and splays a hand on Tony’s left pectoral. He presses the tip of the knife to his skin. 

“You know,” he says, “I used to think that, too.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be concluded...(in a day or two).


	7. Signal to Noise

**7: Signal to Noise**

“No,” Tony says, “That’s not what I meant.” 

And he punches the other man square in the face. 

His fist connects with a noise like _SPLAK,_ and not much else. The other man blinks, startled, and then laughs. The laugh has a thin and splintering edge to it. There’s nothing of amusement there. 

He surges forward and brings the knife around and Tony latches his fingers onto the knife wielding hand, tendons and bones moving beneath skin— _a marvel of natural engineering_ —and twists it violently into a textbook _koto gaeshi._ The other man’s lips peel back and his fingers fly apart involuntarily. The knife skitters toward a wall. 

Tony lurches to his feet and scrambles for the nearest heavy object in the kitchen: a waffle iron, pristine and unused. He grabs it and brings it around in a perfect arc as a figure looms up behind him. 

It connects squarely with the other man’s face—WHAM—sending him reeling back, clutching his head. 

For a moment Tony only sees Bruce, staggering and in pain, bloody fingers in shaggy hair. 

_Illness,_ he thinks again, _He’s not in control, he doesn’t know what he’s doing._

Tony hesitates, shifting his weight, and the other man lifts his head. 

“You _hit_ me,” he growls, voice laced with something like rage, and wonder. Adrenaline floods Tony’s system ( _notbrucenotbrucehithimstophimstophim_ ). The other man lunges and Tony hits him again 

WHAM

and again

( _stophimstophimstophim_ )

WHAM

( _likeadoglikearabiddog_ )

and the other man staggers to one knee and Tony slams him in the face one more time

WHAM

( _puthimdownlike a_  
 _like a_ )

and he’s on both knees now, panting and bleeding. Tony draws his aching arm back and the other man lifts his head. 

( _like a penitent sinner_ )

Tony stares at him and sways as his adrenaline ebbs. His chest rises and falls, and his breath scrapes his throat. He can hear his heart, feel his pulse slamming away. 

He’s trembling, goosebumps surging over his skin and fading away. He’s cold, and then he’s hot, but he can’t really feel it. His hand aches. He arms trembles. 

It’s not as if Tony’s never been in a fight. So many hairline fractures in his fingers, legs and arms have splintered and healed up that the bones are notably thicker now. He’s managed to break the knuckles on his right hand at least twice. He still wakes up nights with the memory of the heat and smell of burning flesh and the cold unhesitating rage that accompanied the birth of Iron Man. 

But this is different. This is terrible, and personal. It’s in his home, in his space. And the man on the floor has the face of a friend. 

_But does he?_ Tony wonders, _Did I ever know him at all?_

The other man blinks slowly up at him. Droplets of blood fall from his eyelashes and spatter his cheeks, red on red. He doesn’t move. The moment stretches into a single, crystallized instant. 

It’s Bruce’s face. It’s the Hulk’s face. It’s some combination of the two and it’s something utterly different, completely new. 

Or very old. 

But, Tony thinks, it’s still the same _person._

_Fuck me,_ he thinks, and groans out loud. 

He throws the waffle iron into the corner. The man on the floor growls, an ugly animal noise. Tony huffs something very near a laugh. 

“What did I say,” he pants, wiping at his face with a trembling hand, “About indulging your little self-flagellation kink?” 

_“Kill you,”_ the other man snarls, and gooseflesh sweeps Tony’ s body again and the hair on his arms stands up but he doesn’t do anything more than sway, and laugh again. 

“You don’t want to kill me,” he says, “If you did, I’d already be in pieces all over the floor.” 

He leans forward, close enough that the other man could tear off his face if he wanted to (but he doesn’t, he doesn’t, instead he leans back, face transfixed and full of…something). 

Tony says, slowly and deliberately, _“You want someone to stop you.”_

The other man laughs, thin and desperate. His eyes are wide, getting wider, showing the whites all around his irises. 

Tony grimaces but presses on. 

“All those dead bodies, those… _things,_ the horrors you saw? It was you _punishing yourself.”_

The other man’s lips pull back. 

“All this psychological stuff, it’s just noise to me, people aren’t like machines. But I’m pretty damn sure. That’s what it was, whether you know it or not.” 

Tony sways and passes a hand across his face. “Some part of yourself—that’s what caused it. You let the Hulk in—and okay that was my idea, I put it in your head, I admit it— but that…that maybe opened the way to letting in _other things._ Things that you—that Bruce—that _whoever_ —didn’t know about. But _some_ thing knew. Some part of you remembered, and what you did to—to your father, you still feel guilt. Even though he did…what he did. To you. And you thought—you thought that you needed to be punished, for killing him. _Wanted_ to. And I guess you thought that by being the monster, the villain, you could make that happen. It’s like some kind of, of suicide by cop, Christ, which I guess makes me the cop.” 

Tony shakes his head sharply, presses a hand over the scar tissue and skin graft on his chest. 

“But you don’t get to be the bad guy, Bruce. _Hulk._ You don’t get to escape that way. You’re not wired for it, in your heart of hearts. Deep down…deep down, and I hate to break it to you buddy except that I actually don’t, but you actually _give a shit._ About people. About _other people.”_ He straightens up, nods a little to himself, pleased with the solution to the riddle. 

“And that’s the difference between you and a monster.” 

The other man inhales, a desperate terrified noise, and a sudden wave of heat pulses off his skin. Tony curses and stumbles back three or four steps, until he fetches up hard against the kitchen island. 

_Fuck,_ he thinks again, and for a fraction of an instant he fears that he’s utterly misread the situation, misunderstood everything. For all that it feels true. For all that he knows in his gut that he’s _right._

Green rushes across the other man’s skin in a wave. Tony watches the terrible wounds close up as if they’d never been, watches the human-size body grow and expand, tendons and skin stretching and cells multiplying to accommodate some enormous internal pressure: heat and light, rage and pain. 

And deep, deep inside, something small and fragile. 

Something in need of protecting. 

The Hulk lurches toward Tony, leans forward on his huge knuckles, and screams in his face. His breath is desiccated and hot, like a breeze blowing from a crematory fire. 

Tony’s muscles are locked in place. He doesn’t even try to move. 

_Bruce,_ he thinks, _And the Hulk. And the other…they come from the same place._

The Hulk tips his head back and screams again. At the sky, this time, or maybe at something else much further away. 

It goes on, and on, longer than it should. Longer than anything human, longer than anything merely animal or mortal. It shakes the rafters, it rattles the windows in their frames. Dust sifts down from the ceiling and settles in a film on the ruby-red drops of blood scattered across the floor. 

Tony breathes shallowly. His skin trembles but he doesn’t move from where he stands. 

The Hulk screams and screams and tears at the floor and when he slams out through the far wall, Tony scrambles around the island and shelters behind it, mimicking the duck-and-cover posture with his arms shielding his head as debris and dust rain down on him. 

He hears sections of the ceiling giving way, winces at the noises of collapsing beams, crashing mortar, glass raining down in shards. But inside his own body, very little happens. His heart rate doesn’t even seem to go up. He feels strangely sheltered, here on the floor with his arms over his head while destruction rains around him. Eventually the noises stop and he unfolds himself, leans back against the island, still remarkably intact but covered in drywall dust. He exhales a long breath. 

Outside, it takes a surprisingly short amount of time for the birds to start singing again. 

Tony doesn’t move, because where the hell is he going to go? He supposes he must lose track of time. He doesn’t notice it happening, only registers the ache in his bones from sitting so long minutes or maybe hours later, when he hears the front door open and the sound of footsteps approaching his position at something very near a run. 

Pepper bursts through the doorway and staggers to a halt with a dismayed curse. 

“Tony?” she calls, across the barrier of the destroyed kitchen. 

“Hey, Pep,” he offers weakly. She stares at him in something that might be disbelief, or again might be exasperation. 

When catches her expression, he can’t help himself. 

He starts to laugh, and for a long time he can’t stop. 

______________________

Everything after that is a blur of Pepper stripping his clothes and shoes and stuffing them both in one of the house's showers— _“Decontamination, Tony, work with me here.”_ —and bundling him off to the hospital. 

After that there are long hours of starched whiteness, paperwork and competent people in scrubs, small tasteful paintings and antiseptic atmosphere and the occasional distant scream. Tony endures it all because if he doesn’t Pepper will look at him, so he just goes along with the tests and needles and scarily competent nurses and back-and-forths with his personal physicians and even the blood transfusion. 

Later he’s been deposited on a nice clean bed in a private room and Pepper sits primly in the comfortable chair by the window, working her way through some project or other on her tablet. 

She’s ostensibly ignoring him, but Tony cuts his eyes at her repeatedly from his position on the top of the starched hospital sheets, until she sighs in exasperation and with a deft swipe of her finger closes whatever application she’d been battling, before lifting her head and pursing her lips. 

“Stop it with the eyes already, would you? My God.” 

“I’m not _dying,_ Pep, really I’m fine. Can we go now?” 

She levels him with a dead-eye stare and Tony squirms on top of the starched white sheets before looking down, and then away. 

Silence stretches between them. Pepper doesn’t seem inclined to break it. Tony clears his throat and opens his mouth once or twice: aborted attempts at conversation openers. Pepper returns to her tablet and Tony wishes, suddenly, bizarrely, for some sort of analog form of entertainment—for the sound of a crisp turning page to interrupt the silence. 

Finally, he coughs. Offers, when Pepper looks up, a wan smile without the previous hysterical edge. 

He proffers, “This hasn’t been the best week of my life.” 

“No,” Pepper agrees, calmly, “It certainly hasn’t.” 

“But it hasn’t been the worst, either.” He pauses, then adds, “Actually it’s not even in the top five.” 

That earns him a smile, or at least an amused quirk of the lips. The silence returns again, but it’s less strained this time. 

Eventually, Pepper shifts a little in her chair. It should creak with the motion, but it doesn’t. 

“It’s going to be okay,” she offers, and somehow it’s not as lame an offering as it should be. Tony snorts anyway. 

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he says. Pepper shrugs. 

“But,” he adds, dropping the words into the white silence with deliberate precision, “But we’re adults, and some kind of…of heroes. Or whatever. And that means that we _deal with the shit_ that comes down the line.” 

Pepper does genuinely smile at him this time, with a gentle mouth. 

“Yeah,” she agrees softly. “It does. And we do.” 

Outside, twilight is falling. Nurses come and go on soft shoes. Tony dozes on the bed and startles awake once or twice to the unpleasant sensation of goosebumps sweeping his skin. Once he wakes up with his fists clenched at his sides, and he forces them to unclench joint by aching joint. 

Pepper never leaves. 

At four a.m. he wakes up and she’s curled on the bed with him, drooling onto his shoulder. 

“Pepper,” he mutters, “Hey, Pepper.” 

She doesn’t wake up, which is pretty okay. 

______________________

He walks. It’s dark. It’s not cold but his mouth is dry and his head hurts. Really hurts, aches with the dull relentlessness of physical ailment, of disease and exhaustion. 

He walks, stumbles, falls, gets up again. Rests his hand on something—the trunk of a tree, he realizes slowly, from the texture under his palm and fingers. He squints, blinks and blinks, and that doesn’t do anything about the darkness and his head _really hurts._

He takes a breath and it scrapes over his throat. He leans toward the tree. God, it’s dark. Has he been here long? Where is he? Where is….

Slowly, the nature of the darkness surrounding him penetrates his awareness. He recognizes the smell in the air. He tastes the breeze. 

He realizes that it’s nighttime. 

He sucks in a startled, shaky breath. Nearly inhales his bottom lip. It’s so dark and he—he can barely see. 

He’s all alone. 

He doesn’t know where he came from. Doesn’t know where he’s going. 

His fingers spasm against the rough bark of the tree as his knees give way and he sinks to the earth. The dry earth. 

With his other hand he covers his mouth. His fingers tremble against the skin of his face. 

He doesn’t know where he is. 

He doesn’t know where he came from. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going. 

(He doesn’t remember his name.) 

______________________

They tell him flying’s a risk, which Tony scoffs at, and that he’ll need to be monitored and have his blood checked again in a few days. They recommend that he either remain nearby so he can continue to be treated by the same team, as they’re already familiar with his case, or at the very least transfer all his records to his current physicians and have the remaining bloodwork and treatments carried out in the peace and privacy of his own home. 

Tony shrugs and says he doesn’t have any pressing appointments (which is probably a lie) and avoids catching Pepper’s eye as he does so, for fear that she’ll trap him in her “Tony Stark has lost his entire damn mind” stare. 

When they climb into Pepper’s sporty little two-door and she shifts into reverse, though, he shoots a brief glance in her direction. The expression on her face when she spots him looking is both knowing and, to his surprise, a little bit fond. 

They go back to the cottage without actually discussing it. Pepper trails after him as he circumnavigates the house and comes to stand beside him near the gaping hole that was the back patio. Together they look out toward the mountains. The sun hangs just above the craggy peaks and bathes them in golden radiance. 

Behind them, a fragment of drywall detaches itself from the broken inner wall and crashes to the tiled floor, shattering into fine white dust. 

“It’s too damaged,” Pepper says finally, breaking the silence. 

“Yeah.” 

“We can’t—we should go to a hotel.” 

“Yeah.” 

“There’s blood on the floor.” 

“Probably squirrel droppings too, at this point.” 

She snorts, but doesn’t say anything else for a while. 

Eventually she clears her throat. 

“Do you want to go and look for him?” 

He startles, slightly, a brief wash of cold rushing over his skin. 

“Uh…”

“Because,” she continues calmly, still gazing into the far distance, “You could cover more ground with two people looking.” 

“I,” he coughs into his fist. Is silent for a minute. “Oh,” he says finally. 

Beside him, the corner of Pepper’s lip turns up, very slightly. 

______________________

He opens his eyes and stares up at the green leaves and the bright sunlight flashing through them. 

He doesn’t remember his name. 

He sits up with a tearing gasp and leans forward, hands digging into his scalp—no, no, he’s Bruce. He’s Bruce Banner. He always was…he’s always been. 

_(Yes._

_Be Bruce._

_Bruce is almost a person. Bruce is safe._

_Bruce is harmless.)_

“I—” he tries, and his voice breaks on the word like a wave on a stone, and there’s nothing else. 

_(Shut off the parts that don’t work._

_Past over the nastiness with something else._

_Create distance._

_Give it a name.)_

He sits on the forest floor and breathes in ragged gasps. 

He doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here. 

“I,” he tries again, “I was—”

He was what? He was. Somewhere subtropical. Asia? It hurts to think about ( _a deep blood red pain_ ), but he shuts his eyes and catches flashes of faces, pieces of images. Too-blue sky, corners of rice fields, the welcome shade of palm trees. Ugly static— _red, white_ —cuts across the images, keeps each one separate, contained in individual bubbles of disconnected experience. He can’t piece them together into a timeline. He can’t place himself in relation to anything. 

It’s an incoherent mess. Even worse than usual. 

“I’m,” he says again, tilting his head back, eyes wide and hands still buried in his hair. “I’m. I’m not okay. 

“Something. Something’s wrong.” 

The words rattle around his head. 

_I’m not okay_

_There’s_

_something_

_wrong with_

      _ ~~us~~_

me

And the next thought, which should _always always always_ be the first thought, and which hits him like a fist to the stomach and leaves him gasping and ashamed, is: 

_Oh God did I hurt anybody_

______________________

They do look. Pepper puts on a pair of sneakers and they traipse around the woods, and Tony feels…kind of silly. Like a kid playing at explorer, maybe. 

He says, “Pepper.” 

She turns back from where she’s been tramping a few feet ahead of him, holding a branch out of her way. She has sweat stains under her arms. 

Tony takes a breath, and he tells her. 

He tells her that for the last few days, it’s been as if _his_ world, the world of hospitals and warm beds and showers and clean linens and warmth and safety and _control,_ and Bruce’s world, a world of desolation and sickness and confusion and loneliness and disorder, had achieved some kind of weird conjunction. Something like a celestial event, like the moon crossing in front of the sun. And now the moon is moving on, the sun is shining on Tony again, and even though Tony and Pepper are in the same physical location as Bruce, they’ll never ever find him. 

He’s here, but he isn’t _here._

“We don’t intersect anymore,” he says. 

Pepper watches him in silence. She steps in his direction and lowers the branch back to its normal position. 

“That’s pretty philosophical,” she says, “For you.” 

“Oh…shut up,” he grumbles. 

She puts a slender hand on his arm. 

“It probably feels like our world isn’t real to him too, you know,” she says. 

Tony nods. He feels nauseous, but only faintly. There’s a chill in the air, a bite of something damp, blowing out of the sky, rattling the leaves. 

Pepper says, “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow.” 

“Okay,” he says. “Then we’d better keep looking.” 

______________________

He follows the paths of destruction. Most of them lead nowhere and just ramble pointlessly through the wilderness, ending at random stone outcroppings and dry streambeds. They’re echoes of purposeless expenditures of energy; chaotic, destructive, meaningless. 

Bruce observes the results of what he’s pretty sure are his own actions, and experiences nothing but a gaping emptiness. In some ways he’s starting to feel more like himself, as his mind settles into familiar grooves, and he feels less adrift with every passing hour. In other ways, though, he feels very tenuous. As if those very thoughts, as if his entire sense of self, is a thin membrane atop a bottomless abyss. A two-dimensional illusion, like the refraction of light off of an oil slick. Exquisite, in its own way, but ultimately shallow. 

Hollow, and temporary. 

He goes without food or water. Without shoes. He goes without any connection to the recent past, any idea of what the future might bring. He goes in the bright sunlight and summer heat. He goes alone. 

Some time the second (or is it third?) day he finds himself standing at the mouth of a trail of destruction, staring at what he’s pretty sure is some kind of mirage, or hallucination. 

It’s a house. 

Why is there a house? Here, in this wilderness? _Why is there a house?_

He stands there helplessly, as the world flies out from under him, and doesn’t realize he’s lost his balance until he sits down heavily on the earth. He’s so tired. His skin is dry. His mouth is dry. He’s hot, feverish. He can’t die. He knows he can’t die. But he’s not sure he’s alive, either. He’s not sure anything is real, anymore. 

Why is there a house? Why is there

In this place

Why? 

He could lie down. He could just…and then everything would stop. He wouldn’t have to be asleep. He wouldn’t have to be awake. He could just…switch off. 

He could wrap the softness around himself and just go away. 

He could be empty. He could be nothing. 

He could be no one. 

He sits on the ground and stares at the house. Most of the time he forgets to blink. The sun crawls across the sky. 

He sits and stares, and there’s nothing. 

Nothing. 

______________________

They’re halfway to the hotel when the rain hits full force, hammering out of the sky, and Pepper curses and pulls to the side of the road for a good ten minutes, until visibility improves. 

She’s about to pull back into the lane when Tony says, “Shit, shit, go back to the house, I forgot something.” 

“What are you—”

“Pepper, _please,_ it’s stupid but I can’t just _leave_ it there.” 

She blows a sharp breath. “Okay. Okay. Just hang on.” 

Pepper swings a sharp U-turn, tires squealing, but she has exquisite command of her vehicle and they never so much as wobble. 

It’s a twenty minute jog back to the cottage and Tony spends the entire ride peering through the windshield and throttling his every urge to blurt out warnings, or a ‘Careful, Pepper!’, or anything else that could be immediately followed by his being knotted into a pretzel and stuffed into the trunk. 

They pull into the driveway and he’s out of the car almost before they’ve stopped moving. 

“Be right back!” he shouts over the roar of the rain, and then he’s sprinting inside, slamming through the front door which he didn’t bother to lock, and he’s immediately engulfed in the cottage’s cool, shadowy interior. 

He makes a beeline for the undestroyed portion of the house, and the study, where he’s left his files, tablets, everything. And that stupid fucking bird skull. _The only thing he got from Bruce._

He can’t hear very much, over the noise of the rain. The wind blows cold from the destroyed portion of the house, and he shivers. He needs a nap. He needs a hot shower. A solid meal. And then sleep, even if it’s just in a lousy hotel bed. 

He reaches for the bird skull where he left it on the table, but freezes when all the hair on his arms stands on end. He stops breathing. 

He can’t hear anything. Hasn’t consciously noticed anything. But something has changed. 

He whips around. 

There’s nothing in the room. It’s impossible to hear anything over the rain. But something tripped his subconscious response to danger. 

He takes a breath. Leaves the damn skull. Pads carefully and silently across the room, through another room, and down the hall toward the kitchen. 

The air gets colder, and damper, the closer he gets to the kitchen. He stops in the hallway, and doesn’t step into the room. It’s destroyed. It’s too dangerous. It’s nothing but a blasted ruin where a coherent, sophisticated structure once stood. 

Someone is standing there, framed by the grey light. Surrounded by devastation. 

Of course. 

“Bruce,” he says, softly. His voice is barely audible, even to himself. He clears his throat. 

_Don’t,_ a voice inside whispers, and he remembers. A knife, a bloody smile. 

A flicker, behind the irises. 

A moment like a flash of light. A tiny distant star. 

_A scream, a scream._

_“Oh God,”_ he breathes, shutting his eyes briefly. Then louder, before he can change his mind, he calls again. 

“Hey, Bruce!” 

Bruce jerks around, eyes wide, and he’s filthy and his clothes are utterly destroyed, and he doesn’t have any shoes, because why would he? He makes some kind of noise, and his fingers flex at his sides, and then he brings his arms up and folds them loosely across his chest, hands wrapped around his biceps. 

“Tony?” he croaks. 

“Yeah,” he says, and starts picking his way across the shattered floor, around the dried blood. “That’s what they call me.” 

“I was…” Bruce starts, pauses, and then says, “I’m. I was…in Asia?” His voice is tentative, and desperately confused. 

Tony presses his lips together and inhales. So this is what he has to work with. 

Okay. Okay. 

“You were,” he offers. 

“And this isn’t…”

“We’re in New York,” Tony tells him. “Upstate New York.” 

“I.” Bruce shuts his eyes. “I don’t. I-I-I think I’m not real.” 

Tony doesn’t say anything for a while. The rain is very loud. 

Eventually he clears his throat. 

“You don’t have to be alone,” he offers. It comes out weakly, but it’s all he’s got. 

“Did I hurt anybody?” It’s faint, anguished. 

“Come inside,” Tony says, “It’s a mess in here.” 

Bruce tries to wet his lips, but it seems to have little effect. 

“Tony,” he whispers, voice so small Tony has no choice but to step closer to hear him, “There’s something wrong…with me.” 

Tony sighs. He suddenly feels both very tired, and strangely light. 

“I know,” he says. 

“My head hurts,” Bruce says, and Tony’s pretty sure Bruce isn’t really aware he’s said the words out loud. “I want it to stop. When does it stop? It _hurts._ ”

“Come inside,” Tony says again. 

It isn’t much. 

But it’s all he’s got. 

______________________

He calls Pepper, tells her to go on ahead. That he’ll bring Bruce along the next day, once he’s got him a little more settled. If she’s worried, she doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t tell him, “Be careful,” which he appreciates. 

At this point he thinks he’s established that he’s the sort of person who runs into the burning house. 

He stays with Bruce in the living room that night. The other man is barely coherent, and even cleaned up and wearing fresh clothes he sits cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall and alternating between violent shivering and almost catatonic stillness. Tony texts Pepper around midnight and says, _I think we’re just seeing the leading edge of whatever this is going to turn into. I’m gonna need security measures to keep what happened last time from happening again._ After a pause he adds, _And more subtle than the suit._

_Agreed,_ she replies, and he knows that she’s already looking into it. 

He dozes off on the couch sometime around one or two, during one of Bruce’s protracted moments of eerie immobility. When Tony wakes up, it’s after seven and the rain has stopped and the birds are yelling up a storm outside and Bruce is gone. 

Tony searches the whole house, top to bottom, and there’s no doubt at all. 

Bruce is gone. 

When Pepper screeches up in the driveway and Tony stomps down the front steps and falls into the passenger’s seat, the set of his mouth is grim. 

“What are you going to do?” she asks. 

“What do you think?” he returns, reaching into the bag behind her seat and commandeering her tablet, “I’m going to find him, and bring him back.” 

“But you said you couldn’t.” 

“Well that was bullshit,” he says. “Who listens to me when I talk? That’s just words. What matters are results.” 

She grabs hold of his hand, the left one, which he kind of needs for the program he’s started constructing, but he doesn’t pull away for a moment. Just lets her hold on, strong and sure, and unshakeable. 

Tony exhales a long breath, and looks up at her face. In the light of the sunrise she looks tired, bruised under her eyes, but steady and strong and prepared for whatever comes next. Tony nods a little to himself, and to her. 

“I’m going to help him, Pepper.” 

“Good,” she says, and holds his hand a little tighter. “Somebody’s got to.” 

Outside, the wind shakes the trees.

**The End**

______________________  
______________________  
 _But let it be known that I have not died:_  
 _That there is a stable of gold in my lips;_  
 _That I am the West Wind’s little friend,_  
 _That I am the enormous shadow of my tears._  
______________________  
______________________

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *koto gaeshi: small hand twist (wrist lock)  
> Good for use by a weaker opponent against a stronger opponent
> 
> **Notes:** _It’s pretty obvious that between The Avengers and Iron Man 3, Tony got some serious actual fight training in, mostly because it was also pretty obvious that in terms of technique he was massively outclassed by Thor. Too bad we never got a montage of his fight training!_
> 
>  
> 
> _The problem with writing about mental illness is that mental illness itself is inherently chaotic and anti-narrative. It may seem very orderly and logical for the person on the inside, who is experiencing effects on the mind and body over which they have no real control, but I feel that it’s important to emphasize that mental illness, more than anything else, impacts a person’s ability to be functional. Its primary characteristic is dis-order._
> 
>  
> 
> _Would Tony be within his rights to kick Bruce to the curb and let him deal with his situation on his own? I can’t answer that question. Someone who’s been in Tony’s situation would be better suited to do that than me. Is it unrealistic that Tony would try to help Bruce, even after everything? Well, I’m working on the assumption that Tony regularly does risky, possibly overreaching things in order both to satisfy his sense of guilt over a lifetime of building weapons, and also because he is somehow extraordinary. It might be dangerous, it might even be kind of dumb, but the guy flies around in a metal suit of armor and risks his life pretty regularly. And he does give a shit about people. And about Bruce. And yeah, he would run into a burning house, he would run towards the screams. Does it take a superhero to help someone whose mental illness makes them dangerous to the people around them? I don’t know._
> 
>  
> 
> _Homelessness and mental illness often go hand in hand, and part of that is due to the stress it places on people who might offer assistance, including family and friends. Having one’s life threatened is a pretty major issue. It might explain why there’s that storyline in the comics where a bunch of the big brains in Marvel 616 decide to shoot the Hulk into space, for everyone’s safety. On the other hand, if anybody would decide to set aside concerns for his own life and general well-being in order to help someone he cares about, why shouldn’t it be Tony?_
> 
>  
> 
> _Another major characteristic of mental illness is that it’s extremely isolating._
> 
>  
> 
> _Part of the reason chapter 6 especially was so dark is that I am writing from the perspective that Tony Stark is Iron Man. He’s a super hero who’s fought aliens and terrorists and monsters, and been menaced and violently attacked and etc. on multiple occasions. The threat needed to be real. I was aiming for super-villain scary. A little physical violence, some menacing, a monologue, a threat never carried out._
> 
>  
> 
> _But the depiction of small-scale, immediate, personal violence seems to trip a different set of responses than your average super-villain megalomania, which is interesting. If Tony had been chained up and hung over a vat of acid, it would probably elicit very little reaction._
> 
>  
> 
> _There’s probably a lesson in this, though I don’t know exactly what it is._
> 
>  
> 
> _I was thinking to myself, ‘Self, what is the point of this story?’ And I thought about the stuff back at the beginning, with the bits about ordinary people, and how much misery and suffering is embedded in the very fabric of the world. And this is something that Bruce cares about. And so does Tony—though in his case probably more from a distance. And I also thought about the ‘is he a monster or not?’ riddle, and the significance of that. And the question throughout seems to be how does one differentiate monstrosity from humanity, if not actual heroism? And the answer seems to have something to do with a) giving a crap, and b) doing something about it. And the fact that in life there are some things you just can’t do on your own. And sometimes we are at the mercy of the choices that other people make, or don’t make, on our behalf._
> 
>  
> 
> _Thanks for reading, hope I didn’t scar anybody for life!_

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes selected from Federico García Lorca’s _Pequeño poema infinito_ (Little Infinite Poem), _Gacela VIII: De la muerte oscura_ (Ghazal of Dark Death), and _Omega._ Trans. Catherine Brown, Greg Simon and Steven F. White.


End file.
